Faith in his Faults

Chapter One

The year before my mother passed away my life was nothing but ordinary. I was an ordinary girl, with an ordinary family, going to an ordinary school. I was not someone a person would notice in a room full of people. I had two parents with only one child, who they loved unconditionally. I had teachers and classes that I went to every day and friends who I hung out with every weekend. But that's the thing about death, it ruins everything. Death is like a black storm cloud that comes out of nowhere on a sunny day with zero percent chance of a storm, according to the weather channel. Death wipes your life clean like a sandcastle struck by an incoming wave. Death ruins everything. At least it did for me.

My ordinary life became not so ordinary in the matter of a day. My normal family of two parents and a child, turned into a wifeless husband and a motherless daughter. My daily school schedule turned into an object that was placed on the back burner of a stove, barley noticed. My friends that I hung out with every weekend turned into one friend, the only one that stayed. My ordinary life was turned upside down and I was no longer the person in the room who nobody noticed. In a small town where everyone knew each other, I became the girl with the dead mother, the girl everyone noticed.

When the school bell rang, signaling the end of the day, I couldn't help but feel a rush of relief. I had been back to my normal day of teachers and classes for about two weeks and I hated every minute of it. Everything about Austin High School, a small school, in a small town in New Hampshire, was dreary and sad. The walls were the color of mud, a dark brown that made the hallways feel smaller than they were. The floors didn't help, as they were a dark maroon that reminded me of the color they painted my mothers nails for the services. She hated that color.

As I walked down the lugubrious hallway towards my designated locker, I couldn't help but notice all of the eyes staring at me. In a large town, someone losing a parent might not cause so much attention, but in a small town, it was all anyone was talking about. I tried to focus my attention of the lockers as I passed by, counting off the numbers as I went. 203, 204, 205... on and on, it felt like the hallway was getting longer by the second. 230. When I reached my locker, I quickly entered the code on the dial and opened the door. Shoving my face inside, out of the view of others as fast as I could, I could feel the panic rising in my chest.

Anxiety never existed in my life before my mother passed away. I never experience a panic attack, had never dealt with the constant negative thoughts that forced their way to the front of my brain. Recently, it was a constant struggle in my everyday life. The feeling of absolute dread, which would appear out of nowhere, creeping it's way into my thoughts. The overwhelming, crushing fear that something awful was about to happen and would undoubtedly turn into a full blown panic attack. Panic attacks were a whole other ball game. Imagine your normal beating heart increasing in speed until you felt as though you heart would jump right out of your chest. Imagine the feeling as though your lungs couldn't possibly get enough air, like you were drowning in a pool without water.

The anxiety and panic attacks that have welcomed themselves into my life have set me up for what feels like constant failure. When I would allow myself a moment of serenity, believing my day was going relatively well, my anxiety would force itself to be known, completely unable to be ignored. Sometimes I could work my way through it. Moving myself through the negative thoughts as though I was walking through quick sand, difficult but possible. Other times I would have a panic attack out of nowhere and there was no way of stopping it. I could be in the middle of a grocery store and suddenly feel as though my world was about to end. I could be in the middle of class and suddenly believe my chest was going to surely explode. I was not going to let today be one of those days. I was not going to allow myself to succumb to the many eyes that were surely staring at me behind my locker door at that very moment.