I think it’s rather funny that it takes a whole life time to learn how to live. Day by day nothing seems to change, but when you look back on even the past year let along an entire life time, and you see that only everything is different. Only is it that when you’re dying do you see how you wish you would’ve/could’ve lived.
Growing up, I thought all parents fought like mine did. I thought every child was woken by their parents screaming at each other and doors being slammed. When I was 8 years old, my parents finally got divorced, telling me like all kids with divorced parents, that it would make life so much better and make us a happy go lucky stronger family. I was so excited to not worry about those fights in the middle of the night anymore. But then they sat my brother and I down at our kitchen table one afternoon and talked to us about our new “schedule”. My brother already being able to drive, he didn’t quite have to follow this new schedule my parents made up. All I understood from the conversation was that I was hardly ever going to see my dad, and that I had a feeling I would miss those late night arguments. My parents had separated a couple times before the divorce, so I assumed this was the same thing: going to see my dad, and eating stroganoff with him and my brother. But I was very wrong. This new schedule had everyone angry, asking questions, demanding answers that I didn’t have. It meant tears form coming and going and tears from not understanding. The late night fights that kept me up into the late hours of the night only turned into arguments through my brother and I, which also kept me up at night feeling guilty. I was never one of those kids who felt like they were the reason for the divorce, but I felt I sure didn’t help. Counselor after counselor, and court date after court date, my life was always changing. Someone was always upset and someone was always crying. At 12 years old, I testified against my own parents. Sitting in the small meeting room with both my parents’ lawyers, I never felt more inhuman. No matter what I said, each lawyer twisted it a different way. At the end, nothing I said mattered because someone was crying tears of joy and the other crying tears of loss. One heartbreak.
Between middle school and my sophomore year of high school, a few not so awesome things occurred, but nothing I knew I couldn’t handle. At the end of my 10th grade year, I was diagnosed with pneumonia and mono. After about 6 weeks of doing absolutely nothing, I finally started running and practicing again, but only to feel worse. Now, at some point, everyone has said, “I feel like I’m dying” or “”I feel like death” when they’ve been sick. But imagine feeling like that, but actually be dying and not knowing it. Imagine how it might feel to find out that you’ve been slowly killing yourself for an unpredicted amount of time. I cannot put a word to that feeling, but I know I felt it on July 27, 2012 when I got diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. I had two hours to get to the hospital… I ate baked potato anyways. Everyone in the hospital was very sweet, but had obviously rarely, if ever, dealt with a 16 year old. “You’ll be like everyone else” they said. “You can do anything else anyone else can do” they said. It would’ve been nice to cut the bullshit and have them tell me how it was really going to be. Shots after shots, stares from friends, family, and strangers, and disapproving blood sugars. I was not like everyone else. I could not do what everyone else could do. Let me tell you what a low blood sugar feels like: like you’re so drunk you’re about to pass out. Your head gets too heavy to hold, your tongue too thick to form words, your whole body involuntarily shaking, your heart pounding, etc. Now a high blood sugar is different: you get really hot, thirsty, bitter, and it’s like being told to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but making turkey. You know what you’re supposed to do, but you literally can’t. The worst part about having high blood sugar is producing ketones. Keynotes are the “make you feel like death” part. They’re acids poisoning your body and make your muscles shrink and your body literally deteriorate itself. That is what my second semester of junior year consisted of. In and out of the hospital, only going to a couple full weeks of school. Diabetes is hard mentally, physically, and emotionally. My first semester of junior year, I dated a guy who didn’t love me or particularly care for me, but he acted like it and that’s all I cared about. I cut myself for a while. But second semester I moved on from him and the cutting to partying. I hung out with the wrong people in the wrong places at the wrong times. All of these things I did to cope because it was a pain I could control, not a pain that was controlling me. It took me about a year to finally accept that God was not punishing me and that I did nothing wrong, but that’s a battle I fight every day. Two heartbreak.
Not only was the diabetes a problem my second semester of my junior year, I broke my wrist and completely tore my ACL… a week apart. The pain was enough to make me black out, unfortunately only for about a minute, but I felt it all after that. Every step thinking my leg was going to collapse, and sometimes it did. I thought I was done playing soccer forever, the one thing that connected my family together. I couldn’t walk for what felt like my whole life. I didn’t know what I was going to do anymore. Three heartbreak.
Love. What is it? Being physically attracted to someone or emotionally attached to them? Is it saying “I love you to the moon and back?” or saying you’d take a bullet for them? I think it’s another one of those things that cannot truly be explained. Like every love story starts, I met this guy. He went to a different school, but I didn’t care, I wasn’t too fond of seeing the same people every day anyways. From the start I knew he was different, but I didn’t really allow myself to accept any feelings for him until about a month after first talking to him. I could see that he cared about me, but something was holding him back. He fought for me when I got mad over something stupid and called me out afterwards for getting mad in the first place. He challenged me. But timing isn’t always on our side and it wasn’t the right time. Though I spent too many hours upset, crying, and eating my emotions, I don’t regret any of it. Four heartbreak.
The point of me writing this post is to not gain sympathy from anybody or to just tell a sad tale. I want people to know who I am and where I come from. But I also want people to know that heartbreak happens, it happens all the time, whether it be like these and be major or any of the tiny heartbreaks in between. But time does not stop and time will not go by any slower. Time goes on. Life goes on. And it really is okay to not be okay. Because eventually, it will be okay, and time will open more doors and opportunities. No matter how sucky life gets, it’s still life and you will continue to live through the pain and the joy.
You live an entire life just to learn how to live.