Aha

Today I was reading some of my favorite blogs.

And these ladies were talking about their "aha" moments.

Those moments when things just click for you.

For me it happened at the end of my senior year of high school.

So pretty really recently.

My whole life I was really happy.

I loved my life more than anything.

The people in it, the things I did, even the days where I did absolutely nothing.

Then life hit me.

Until I was 16, nothing really painful had ever happened.

But at the age of 16 a lot of things fell apart for me.

A marriage, mulitiple friendships, things I'd worked my whole life for.

I was always the one who could handle it by myself.

But this was too much for me.

I blamed myself for everything.

I began to feel I wasn't good enough.

I deserved for my life to fall apart.

I wasn't skinny enough.

I wasn't pretty enough.

People didn't like me.

I didn't fit in.

I didn't deserve to be loved.

These were really hard feelings for me.

I'd never struggled with this much.

I was, by definition, depressed.

But I couldn't admit to it.

I did everything I could think of to trick myself into being happy again.

But it doesn't work that way.

I kept these feelings to myself for almost two years.

It all happened in a moment.

I was laying in my bed late at night.

My chest felt like it was caving in and I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't move.

I was holding on by a thread.

Then I realized that I needed help.

I've never been good at asking for help.

I like to be independent.

So going to my mom and asking to see a therapist was one of the hardest things I had to do.

But after talking to my doctor, I realized that the problem wasn't that I wasn't good enough or pretty enough or skinny enough. It was that I didn't know how to love myself.

I didn't know how much I was worth.

I didn't realize how much I meant to people.

I'm not going to tell you I'm completely cured.

It's not something that just goes away.

I still struggle with being myself and being ok with who I am.

But realizing that I am worth so much more than I ever gave myself credit for made me one step closer to being ok again.

I can honestly sit here and say I am happy.

I am comfortable with being myself.

I am ok with sharing these things.

And from now on I know that I will be ok.

I may have my moments, but I will never let myself suffer the way I did.

I am better than that.