I grew up thinking divorce was a dirty word. That kind of stuff didn’t happen to families like mine. We were a Christian family. Except for the Sundays when my sister or I had volleyball tournaments, we would go to church. We celebrated Christmas knowing the real reason to celebrate is that Jesus Christ was born. We studied bible stories together and prayed before every meal.

I grew up thinking my parents loved each other and it would always stay that way. The bell jar broke in high school and nothing has been the same since.

There’s so much involved in a divorce. Maybe you have a new home. Maybe there’s a new struggle to pay for that home. Picking a side? Websites with their “professional opinions” recommend you not pick sides, but it’s almost harder not to.

I used to think that it was my fault. I thought the way I treated my parents and the way I responded to the stress from home life contributed to their decision.

I want you to know, it's not your fault. No matter what you’ve done, you did not ruin the marriage.

Divorce is ugly.

It’s war and you do not need to appease both sides.

It has greater effects on you than you think. It happened when I was a senior in high school. I grew up never expecting it to happen. But it did happen. One day I woke up in my own home and later that night I went to bed in a hotel knowing that I was never going back.

Change is inevitable. Your life can turn upside down as fast as Taylor Swift’s switch to a new genre. It’s normal to feel like you’re mourning a death. You’re mourning a lost life that you used to have.

It’s okay if you are having a hard time moving on. There’s nothing simple about a divorce. There’s nothing right about a divorce. It’s wrong and they shouldn’t be normal events in life.

The inevitable “daddy issues” don’t have to be inevitable. The beauty of being in your shoes is learning first hand what not to do in life.

Regret, hate, anger, depression, you’ll feel it. But it won’t last forever. And when you wake up to realize that one day you’ll have the chance to not make the same mistakes your parents did, you’ll be grateful for what you’ve been through.

I’m sorry this is happening to you, but I’m not sorry it happened to me. My senior year of high school was less than normal. I finished school online, got a job, and I moved to live closer to my sister. But in that year of disruption, I learned some cool things. I learned how to file taxes, how to change a tire, how to disassemble furniture and how to pack a U-Haul by myself.

To the girl with parents in the middle of a divorce, I want to say that we are in this together. I found my strength in Jesus Christ. Life will never happen the way you want. But it’s not like we deserve this life anyways. Life is God’s gift to us and when bad things happen, all we can do is pray.