He Changed My Life and Made Me Better

My Decline in Faith

"Oh come to, the alter, the Father's arms are open wide. Forgiveness, was bought with, the precious blood of Jesus Christ."

March of 2014, the end of my 6th grade year is when I had my first glimpse of pain. Not is the physical form, but the emotional form. My Aunt, the one woman I could tell anything to, died. I was crushed. She was my best friend and then she wasn't there.

Everything around me seem irrelevant and terrible. That's when I started to shut down. I was always a happy child. I loved talking and hanging out with my friends. I loved singing and dancing and after my Aunt's funeral I could compare my self to an empty shell.

I closed myself off from everyone. I stopped talking to my friends. I quit dance and locked myself away from my family and hid from everyone. I put walls up and put masks on. I became unrecognizable to my family. My attitude changed to one that is rebellious.

My real downfall was the summer before my 8th grade. I fractured my vertebra and had 3 bulging disks in my back. The doctor told me I couldn't play sports ever again. Now I loved playing sports. I was something I was good at and that I enjoyed. I just shut down.

That was the year I discovered writing. I could write down my emotions and put them into stories about my favorite books and movies. The thing was, I could never get into the story because they all came out depressing. My writing reflected how I felt.

My characters were in place of myself. They came off as irrelevant and unless because that is how I felt. The beginning of my 8th grade year was the worst. People made fun of me because of my injury. I was bullied.

It got a little better when my back healed, but then even worse when I pulled a muscle in my calf. My coaches chastised me for faking my injury and a girl in my class bullied me even more. The only good part is that I found out that when I was healed I could play sports once again.

But I almost didn't want to because of how the coaches treated me. At this point I hadn't talked to my best friend, who told me to always go to her, in two years. My mom got so worried that she started to send me to a therapist for depression. It got so bad, I thought about cutting myself.

When she asked me to describe how I felt around the people in my class in one word I said invisible. I felt unwanted, hated, invisible to people around me. Then, once again, my life was changed.