Chapter 2: Part 2: The Healing begins

After awhile things didn't go away. The voices in my head that constantly said I wasn't good enough stayed where they were except I started to ignore them. I started to smile and pretend to be happy so much so that I convinced myself. I found happiness out of the simple pleasure of being kind and when others were kind back it would bring me joy. I was finally happy or at least happy enough there was still some room left to grow. Over the years I felt a lot. I've always been an emotional person even for a boy many people don't cut enough credit for us. I never got great support from my parents. One time my mom saw my crying over a girl and she told me to "become a man". I now realize that she was wrong. I refuse to be defined by the standards put on by society. Men can have feelings. A lot of times men don't have the outlets they need when they're looking for support. This can lead to a clog of emotions. Balancing too many weights on your chest can be dangerous. Even some of the best of us have broken from it. It can be hard for men to find someone to listen to there feelings. Many times they confide in partners which is helpful however, becoming to reliant on a partner can become an issue as well .  It can cause you to lose that self worth that you fought so desperately to gain. It can make you forget about who you are and what you are. To really grow you need to address the issues weighing you down. I still haven't fully grown into who I should be and it becomes more and more clear each day. My early years of high school I developed a deep sense of empathy. I started to put myself in other peoples shoes. Many of them were going through issues of there own and I started to recognize what makes people them. Everyone grew up under a set of defining circumstances. These would later show trends of corresponding personality and individuality. Now that I was my own person, I started to find my place in the world exploring interests and hobbies. Finding friends and passions. Where I live is pretty rural and it was hard finding the right crowd of people to hangout with. For a long time I settled with just people that I thought were good enough. A lot of people in my high school were in bad places in their lives and I was looking for a set of friends that were in a similarly place to me. Regardless it took awhile to find someone like that. I had a pretty dark past one that takes most awhile to recover from. When I was little I used to go to church with my neighbors because my parents weren't big into the church here. At this time I was a young kid and I had a best friend he was funny and courageous and looked kinda like me at the time so much so that my parents got confused once. I went to his house ever weekend and we would go exploring for hours in the woods. His parents thought we got lost once cause they couldn't find us. Every now and then his parents would go out and he would have a babysitter. Her name was Nancy. She was an amazing person she always had a smile and would hang out with me and my friend all the time. She went to my church and would say hi. Her dad happened to be the pastor. As a kid I kinda had a crush on her, I guess it was just because I looked up to her. Her being 18 and me being probably 9 was definitely a road block though. One day they didn't come to church so I asked my neighbor why I hadn't seen them; that was when I found out that her father was payed off from working there because the church couldn't afford it anymore. The next Sunday she had to switch churches and her father got a job at a different one. That night she decided to drive separate from her family because she needed more time to get ready. It was also that night that she was hit and killed by a drunk driver on her way to church. Being the 9 year old I was emotionally it was scary someone I cared about died. I was close to them. This was around Christmas time and the next day in school we had a substitute teacher. To keep us busy the sub created the assignment to write a letter to Santa about what we wanted for Christmas. In my letter I wrote that all I wanted was to help her family find happiness. Losing a daughters hard and I couldn't even imagine how it was for them, it was traumatic enough for me and she was my friends babysitter. I wrote " I know God can't bring people back to life but I hope he helps them find happiness in their lives. I wish for Christmas that they can all smile at least once." The next day I got called to the office and the family was there. The teacher said she cried reading my letter and contacted them. This impacted my relationship with God from an early age, later affecting me much farther down the road.