Reckless: My Story Part 2

**Possible Trigger Warning. Please be careful reading if you struggle with suicide, anxiety, or self harm**

Moving to South Carolina felt surreal. I was a little numb, and just surrendered myself to whatever would happen. I didn’t know the person I sat beside in the Uhaul, but I closed off the part of me that protested to what was happening. I was all in, ready or not.

We didn’t have an apartment waiting for us. All we had were jobs because we just transferred to a store in South Carolina. We moved in with Tanner’s brother, sister in law, and two small children. We stayed in their basement while we searched for a place to live. At that point in my life, I had lived on multiple people’s couches, in and out of my parents’ house. So it wasn’t all that strange to me, except I didn’t know these people. It was a strange situation because Tanner’s brother was a stay at home dad, so these people were modern. The kids were in school, so sometimes it was just me and the brother at the house if Tanner had a shift and I didn’t. I just stayed in the basement. I honestly can’t remember what I did to pass the time. I just existed.

Eventually we found an apartment and moved to a different area of town. I found a better job at an eye care place as an optician. I quickly bonded with the staff there, other than the second optician. I grew especially close with the Office Manager. She planted so many seeds by inviting me to church. I shrugged it off, and continued about my work.

Other than work, my life consisted of going to the gym and attending car racing events with Tanner. Any extra pennies we had went into his cars. He lived for drag racing, road racing, and building cars. I hated every second of it, honestly, but I kind of thought of my time spent with Tanner as payment, so I just put up with it. There were countless times where we would be out at 4am speeding down empty highways with other car racers. It was such a strange scene to be involved in...car people are a different breed. People who don’t know each other, who have nothing in common other than cars, just hang out in empty parking lots vaping. That’s basically a sum of car people. There $30,000 investment breaks and they rebuild it, and that $30,000 quickly grows to above $100,000. It blew my mind.

I was noticed quickly as a new girl. Being  the new girl brought a lot of unwanted attention and comments about my looks. It became normal, and even welcomed at some point because I learned that my value as a woman is how pretty I am. How many comments can I get this time? It became a motivation for me. Tanner encouraged me to ride in other men’s cars as it would help him build clout among the car people, I suppose. I’m still not 100% sure why he wanted me to ride in others cars. But I did to keep the peace and try to fit in.

My passion for anything slowly faded. I shrunk, in every way. My love for the gym stayed constant, and I spent a lot of time there. But other than that, I became unrecognizable. I became reckless. I didn’t care about my own safety or well being. I truly got to a point where it didn’t matter if I lived or died. I want to make it clear I never got involved in drugs or alcohol or over promiscuous activity. I was just totally and completely numb to any emotion or conviction. It came to the point where I called the suicide hotline multiple times just crying because I couldn’t feel anything. I wanted to die. And this wasn’t the first time I had felt this way.

My struggle with anxiety and depression began at a very very young age, around 6 years old. I began self harming, although me nor my parents knew it was self harm at the time. I was born in the time where mental health was not well known or talked about. Therapy was shameful. Getting help was actually seeking attention. My parents were just distraught that their young daughter was causing harm to her body. They took me to my pediatrician who told me “well don’t do that anymore”. Silly goose, slap on the wrist, why would you hurt yourself? I saw it as I was being a bad girl...so I changed my self harm method. Again, my parents didn’t understand. All they saw was I was harming myself and it broke their hearts. So they did what they thought was best for me; and figured maybe punishment would help combat this “habit” as we thought it was. My anxiety built and built over the years, my self harming went to new heights. And I remember at around 14 years old, telling my parents “I want to die”. That was my first time articulating into words the dark crushing mass on my heart.

And it never went away. Although better, self harm is still something I struggle with when my anxiety wraps itself around me. Although now I recognize it for what it is, and am able to combat it with scripture. But in South Carolina, I recoiled from God’s Word, so I had nothing other than to surrender myself to self harm.

I kept my problems to myself. Tanner didn’t know, no one knew the internal and spiritual battle that was happening around me. There were times I wanted so badly to pray, but I fought that urge down. Old habits die hard, right? That was the old me, the stupid me. The one who clung to something that wasn’t real, wasn’t even there. I recklessly threw myself into the secular world, trying so desperately to be something I was not.

But then something changed. God cracked His knuckles and said “alright young lady. This is enough. I’m coming to get you.”

You know that song “Reckless Love”? Well just as reckless as I was being, God was being 100 times more reckless when He pursued me. What came next, I never thought I was worthy of such love from my Heavenly Father. Something that made it impossible for me to ignore.