I haven't always had faith in my life... When I was 4, my father who was supposed to be protecting me started raping and abusing me. He did this for some time until I was 10. My parents had divorced when I was 8 and I had "supervised" visitation until I turned 10 and I finally felt like I was done. I didn't realise how much I was hurting inside until people started talking to me and still to this day I can't remember some people when they were talking around me because everything felt like it was going in slow motion. I didn't realize the impact the news would have on my family, especially my mother. I was in trauma therapy but I never spoke out loud about my inner thoughts. I struggled for years with PTSD, depression, anxiety, self-image, self-worth, eating disorders, thoughts of suicide, etc. I tear up as I write this but I want to be real. I asked God a lot of times why it had to be me. Why is it that I had to be dealt a bad hand? What could I have done better? What's wrong with me? Maybe, I wasn't meant for this world or maybe he can't hurt me if I'm not alive. As life goes, as soon as I thought I was accepting it and moving on and finding my God again my grandmother passed away suddenly from ovarian cancer; unexpected on my mother and I's part. She was my protector for a long time and a saviour to me because she was there while my mother had to work to support me. That tore me up so bad I didn't speak for almost a week. I slept a lot during that week because it felt like I was living a bad dream; a nightmare is a better word for it. I moved abruptly after she passed to a little backwoods town in Newton County, AR. My mother had been dating a great guy for a couple of years and we moved in with him to get away from everything and get a new start. I struggled again with my faith because I couldn't accept why she had to be taken away from me and why I had to be the one to cry and wipe my tears. You could say I grew up pretty quickly by this point in my life. Fast forward to almost two years ago, I was going out and doing things that I did to forget that I was hurting from it being years of my father never getting tried in court and my grandmother missing events in my life. I met someone who if you had told me about a couple of months before us connecting again that I would be where I am now I would've called you crazy. This person brought me out of the dark and saw my scars, fears, mistreatment, and pain and still accepted me. They healed me from my brokenness and made me feel loved again. I even apologized for questioning him. This person was God. God saw me struggling and said come here and I will clean it up but you just have to trust me again. Now that I have found God again, I plan to become a Radiology Technologist and be a part of something greater than myself. I want to be the reason someone finds peace and treatment. Who knows, maybe even be the reason they change their point of view. I want to be someone I wish I would have had.