Someone once told me that everything that happens to you in life changes you piece by piece, and I truly believe that with all my heart.
What I do not believe though, is that we have no control of how it changes us.
From the time you are born, you begin to learn, to take things in and see how they work. You learn about sounds, and shapes, and before you can even speak you learn things about your parents and how people work. Every day of your life from that first moment you learn things and you start making decision on which things you will replicate and which you wont.
Perhaps my how I was raise made me make different choices, or maybe it was my environment. I wont lie, homeschooling was a very different place than public school. I socialized constantly at all the classes, events and activities that we went to. It was a smaller group and we had no age separation, so I had friends younger than me, older than me, and my own age, but for us that was normal. I had a choice every single day of where we would do our school work, and I even had a little say in some of what we studied (which was awesome for 13 year old me when I decided Egypt was the coolest thing ever)
my mom always said that she wanted to light a fire in my, she wanted me to be passionate about learning and seek it out on my own, and I really think this method worked for me. Those years were some of my best, and my confidence and intelligence flourished. It was very different when compared to my High School years in a public school, and I'm thankful it was my foundation.
What people didn't see, was all the hard stuff going on behind closed doors. I cannot remember a day where my parents we're happily married and didn't fight at least once. I had a sister that would drive them both insane, and that was out of control near constantly. I had brothers with high functioning autism(aspergers) that my parents struggled to help and at times even control. I have scars on my body that are marks left by one of my brothers because he had an episode and my parents couldn't pull him off of me before he hurt me.
I spent a lot of time with my grandmother at her beauty shop because of all the chaos at home, and shes became an unbelievably strong roll model for me. She was always kind and friendly, she did charity work. I saw her change the way woman with cancer looked at themselves and I saw her make them smile and feel beautiful again. I then proceeded to watch her loose her ability to speak, to remember things, and to move. I watched the woman who raised me a good portion of my life die slowly, and get moved around in nursing homes. I got to see her the day before she passed and the one thing I'm glad to say, is she never lost that glint of recognition in her eyes when she saw me and the ability to smile. I don't talk about these things because they still break my heart. I hope and pray every day that I can hold on the the optimistic and kind heart that she taught me to have, because if I could be half the woman that she was I could manage to do amazing things.
Shortly after that I lost my way I think, I started letting silly things take up my time, and letting the wrong people in. I let one person in that made me feel so unclean that what he did to me still hasn't faded. I can't bring myself to say the words or describe it, and few have ever heard them. I went to a place so dark, that I feared I would never come out, and I had a guardian angel that managed to save me, which I am thankful that Matthew passed through my life when he did.
There are other things, too many to recap, but through every hardship I have made it to this place that I am at now, and I'm happy. My optimism is near constant, and I fight my anxiety daily with it by thinking about every little good thing that I can make happen. My hardships have made me wiser, and my pain has made me stronger. I refuse to dwell on these things, I refuse to let myself get lost again, because instead I know that the day may come where I can help lead someone else out of the dark the way my angels have led me.
If at any moment while you were reading this you felt bad for me, you shouldn't, because these are the things that made me who I am, they are the sum of my part and the building blocks to my frame. I'm not done yet, but none of us are, and the next time you feel yourself sinking think of that, you aren't done yet, and you aren't alone.
I am the result of the things that have happened to me, the people who raised me, and the choices I've made since the day I was born.
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