There are many times in life when it looks like nothing could ever go right. It always seems like it’s raining or that no matter what you do, things just never seem to get better. People begin to question why you stopped smiling so much or my favorite “why so gloomy?” To this I found that the only thing that I could say was that "life happens." This is true; life does happen, and for me it happened a lot. It was that it was one thing after another, and there really was nothing I could do to really ever get back on top. Life just happens.

You sit and wonder when the next shoe will drop, and without a blink of an eye it happens. Another injury, another lost friend, another person telling me everything was going to be ok. But was it really? I stopped being able to smile my way through it, or laugh it out at night. And especially when I could no longer see the good side of things, I knew that I no longer believed. I no longer believed that things would be ok. I no longer believed that another shoe wouldn’t drop or that people, no matter what, were good. I no longer believed that God was in my corner, and with that thought I no longer believed in myself.

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” - (Hebrews 11:1).

Being nine years old and so severely afraid of thunder and lightning, I was given this piece of wisdom. There is always something that we are told that stays with us, for me this was it. When times looked down, this is what I hung on to. But there came a time when not even this was good enough. There are beyond so many things to believe. Some believe love will conquer all, some believe people can do no harm, and some people believe in themselves more than they can ever believe in anything else. This is their essence; this is what makes them who they are. They can gravitate towards something and end up taking it by the horns. So, what exactly happens when you stop believing? What happens when you lose you?

You become lost; you are no longer you. My friends were always the ones who could tell if something was up, and when they did I would always hear, “you just aren’t being you.” This more than anything else in the world scared me. I didn’t want to stop being myself, but with everything happening it was easier to be anything but myself. A little piece is gone from you — from your life. It is in this way that when you stop believing, the world seems to stop alongside it.

I would love to say that there is any easy fix, because one wishes that you can get out of this situation as easily as you got into it. This is not the case. There are still times when I don’t see myself as who I once was. I do see, though, someone who in this time learned to take care of other people because she didn’t want to see anyone else stuck in the rut. I see a girl who turned to her family for help, who learned that although I might not be myself, the world doesn’t revolve around me and there are just as many people out there who have stopped believing too. I see a girl now who would do anything for anyone. I see friends who would do anything for me. I may have stopped believing in my own thoughts, but I never had a single person surrounding me who stopped believing. So, yeah it’s ok to stop believing; it’s ok to lose yourself. But remember that when you do stop believing, there are more people in your corner than you think there are.