Do you ever feel like you just want to give up? Maybe there's just too much happening in your life that you can't explain and you can't understand why they happen. Maybe it's about a girl or a boy you put your whole heart into just to find out that you weren't good enough for them. Maybe it's going back to school for the first time in a very long time and you're terrified of failing. Let me shed some light on what I did when the light at the end of my tunnel seemed to fade.

I have been through a lot, but it may not seem like it because I have learned how to not only hold myself together but also how to keep myself from falling into a place in my head where I feel as though I have no hope left. A lot of people ask me “How do you do it?” and sometimes I just don’t know.

I had a woman in my life that was there since I was a baby. She was the woman who raised me. Picked out my clothes for school, helped me with my homework, taught me some good life lessons, and most of all helped shape the strong woman I am today. There were a lot of secrets kept from me when I was growing up. I had siblings and a mother who loves me and my sisters and brother to pieces and all of that was kept from me. As a kid growing up, I never understood why and I became so angry that I started to have so much hate for this woman who gave up 18 years for me. Why? One night she and I got into an argument and I was so angry I told her I hated her and I never wanted to see her again. I didn’t know those hurtful words may be the last she ever heard from me. Then one night I was visiting a friend and I got a phone call. That phone call changed my life in very certain ways. I was told that she had passed away very suddenly of suicide. I blamed myself for weeks because those words I spoke to her were the last ones she ever heard come from my mouth. You may ask how I handled it. I took it very hard. I lost a lot of self-love and hope that I wasn’t to blame. For months I contemplated taking my own life but I couldn’t. I had so much to live for. My family, my father, who ended up going to the hospital after it all happened, my supportive other half, my two beautiful nieces and most importantly, my future.

What most people don’t understand is that this horrible situation that I was/am dealing with wasn’t going to end me as a person. I found my light again. I had to look at the good memories I had with her, the good times I can remember, and what I had growing up was a mother figure. I’m not saying it’s ever easy to find that light that can keep you going but once you find that little bit of hope, hold on to it with everything you have. Once you let hope fade it’s not easy to get it back and find it again.

If there’s one thing that I would tell anyone who is going through any tough times and is struggling to find that light again is that it’s definitely OK to break. It’s OK to cry and scream to let everything out. It’s OK to feel emotions and not know why you feel them. There’s no rule book on certain feelings to feel when something happens. Don’t let anyone tell you how not to feel. You feel sad or angry or hurt, that's OK. We are human beings and we aren’t perfect. We don’t have a certain time period to start feeling OK again. If there are days that you’re not OK and you're sad as ever, it's OK to say “Hey, I’m really sad today." There is absolutely nothing wrong with how much time you take to start to feel OK again.