I Overcame my Struggle

When I was a little kid, growing up in north Chicago, Illinois I was exposed to things little kids should never be exposed to. In December of 99`, our home caught fire because my sisters and I were playing with fire on the stove.

The entire home caught into flames, and we lost everything. We moved down the street and new life began. When I was 7, and my little eyes seen things that they should not have seen. My mom was promiscuous, and she would go out to clubs and parties, and she would drink. Often times I would see her on the phone talking to men sexually and she would listen to songs that were sensual, and she often masturbated.

I was exposed to this excessively as well as porn too. I was curious about all this, and at an early age I set out to ”explore” what they were. I was very young, and had no understanding of what I was doing, but knew whatever it was, it pleased my mom, and so I thought, it would please me too.

I had oral sex with another young person, and I was scared because what I did felt wrong. So, I stopped. But being exposed to sex, that didn’t stop. As I got older and came into my preteens, at age 13 was when I began to get back into exploring sex.

It was all around me. Pornos, magazines, comics, adult programs, sex toys, etc. It felt like a rush. And at the same time, it felt wrong so I would be sneaky so I wouldn’t get caught. I started watching porn and I started masturbating. This continued on for seven years.

In middle school, those were the years things were bad for me. I had my first crush! He was tall, kinda geeky, cute, and he liked me! (so I thought) as time progressed, what I thought I was feeling, that four letter word called love, was a feeling I felt strong. I genuinely liked this person, but this person did NOT have the same intentions I had. While I thought I was falling in “love” this person only wanted to have sex.

I began to understand that when we would stay after school and “hookup”. I’d often lie to my mom and tell her I would stay after school for homework when I was actually making out with this guy. Later on, down the road I came to the conclusion that this guy never really liked me and that made me very sad. He moved on and had a girlfriend and that summer I became depressed. I would sleep in my bed all day long and I would cry over small things and get angry and scream at everyone who made me mad or everyone who picked on me.

When I began the seventh grade, I had learned about myself that I was very smart. I was an AB student and I excelled in everything I did. I played the Viola and achieved intermediate level and also got second place in a music competition. I also sang in the school choir, and I also won the school spelling bee. I was in a few special programs, and these accomplishments took off the want and desire to get involved in sex, but not for long.

When I was in the eighth grade, despite my previous accomplishments, my grades fell, I was still depressed, and I faced new/old problems. I got back into getting involved in sex and I got into it like never before. I started having issues with my weight. I was always a skinny girl, but I somehow believed that I was getting fat, when I really wasn’t. I began the dangerous eating disorder known as bulimia or binging and purging. I would often eat large amounts of food and then throw it all up right afterwards.

I continued this until it put me in the hospital. I was at school one day and I wasn’t feeling well. My chest was in a lot of pain and I could barely breathe. It was hard for me to walk and so I called my mom and she took me to the doctor. And after the appointment I told my mother that I ate something spicy at it was the reason why I am having such bad chest pains.

Of course, I lied to her because I didn’t want her to know what I was doing. And I was also prescribed with two medications, and I began to abuse them. Along with that I started taking laxatives and weight loss pills.

Eventually this took toll on my liver,causing bad pain, and so I stopped taking only the weight loss pills and laxatives. I began to feel even more depressed because I put myself through that. I knew very well I wasn’t fat and hated myself for doing that. Also at home I felt alone because I separated myself from my family because I was depressed.

My family members didn’t really take it to heart that I was really feeling that way, so that made me feel even more alone. And sex, porn, masturbating was a way to escape the feeling of being depressed and alone. At one point in time, I had come to the realization that sex became a habit.

I came to understand what I was doing was wrong, and that I have a choice to stop it. But I didn’t. I was addicted to the rush, the high. It often made me numb, high, distracted, distorted, and I couldn’t control myself. The more I did this, the more I looked for ways to make the high feeling go higher and I have almost died going so far to that point to achieve this high.

I fondly remember purposely stopping my breathing so I could feel high. I had read somewhere that when you slow down your breathing, the feeling you’d feel would be stronger, so I tried it a couple of times and literally would hear my last heartbeat before I’d stop masturbating and try to catch my breath. I would catch my breath and then do it all over again. It was horrible.

I had a false sense of hope that doing this would make me feel better. It didn’t. And when I came to that realization, it made me even more depressed. And I actually came to the point where I really wanted to stop, everything all together. I knew it wasn’t making anything better so I stopped looking at porn and I tried to stop masturbating, but I couldn’t. It was hard. I again came to the realization that I was addicted to sex and masturbating. This brought my depression to a low.

At the time my sister was having her own issues as well, but the only difference was that my mom knew hers. My sister ran away from home, and it made me very sad. I missed my sister and one day I was cleaning up I was thinking about running away as well. But I knew I had nowhere to go.

And so, I walked into my basement, and I started cutting myself. The first time I did it I cried hard and for each thing I had did to myself, for each problem that wasn’t even my fault I blamed myself. Then I would stop crying and I’d pretend everything was okay while continuing with my addiction to masturbating.

I had come to the point where I was contemplating suicide, but I didn’t know how I would take my life. So, I studied death and suicide. And I also contemplated slitting my wrists but my mother who at the time was dealing with alcoholism found out because my friend came over and she saw me cutting myself and she went ahead and started cutting herself too. I had told her not to, but she didn’t listen.

I got in trouble and once again I lied, telling her that we were bored and just wanted to see what it felt like. She believed me. But after that I stopped. So as I continued to study death and suicide, I brought on these habits at school. My teacher became concerned but the way he went about expressing that concern was blunt and insensitive. But no one seemed to pay attention.

I had found out that I still had some of my medication left from my bulimia incident and I actually got excited because I found pills that I could use to take my life. I thought the plan was perfect …. Around the time I had made the decision to kill myself, life seemed to get worse! And I was tired.

I fondly remember I was at school, and I was on the edge of having a nervous breakdown. I was about to cry and I proceeding to run out the classroom all the down the hallway with the intention on jumping from the second-floor staircase. But when I reached the stairs, I got scared. So, I stood there, I sat on the stairs, and I cried. My friend had come to check on me so I quickly stopped crying and I smiled, and I said to my friend,

“I’m just tired.”

So, on that fateful week, I planned to commit suicide at school. I didn’t want to be at home. So, I was in class, and I decided not to do my work. While everyone else was doing classwork I was writing my suicide note. I felt indifferent about it, yet I was sad. I had written everything I was going through and how I came to the decision to take my life. After that I folded it up and sat it on the table and I got up and went to my locker. I had brought my pills to school, and I decided to take all of them.

As I poured all the pills in the palm of my hand, a fear came over me, but I ignored it. I believe I took 6-7 pills and I just remember thinking; this is it. I didn’t really think to say goodbye either. So later on that day I was at home doing my homework and I felt myself falling asleep. I told my mom I was going to take a nap, so I believed that was my cue to go lay down and sleep with the intention of not waking up.

I slept for two days and when I woke up it was Saturday. I immediately was like, “man! I’m still here.” “I have to figure something else out.” So everyone was eating breakfast and I walk into the kitchen looking around and then I just stood there. All of a sudden, my body felt heavy. My vision was going out. I began to see stars and everything was going black. My face got hot and my ears were ringing. And I began to feel myself falling back but then.

At the time I didn’t know, but God came and he grabbed me. All by his might he was holding me and he pushed my body towards the sink and proceeded to get a huge cup of water and I drank it. I felt awake and alive. After that I stopped abusing drugs. At school that following week, my other teacher wanted to talk to me. I knew why. She must had seen my suicide note. She wanted talked to me and she was sad. But my other teacher made the situation worse. He had made an negative comment and I left the classroom.

My teacher and I sat down in a private room and I cried in her arms. She cried with me too. We were in there for a long time. She talked to me about God. I can’t remember what she told me exactly but afterwards she told me everything I had wrote doesn’t define who I am. And she ripped up my note.

Afterwards my friends came in to comfort me. Then my other teacher apologized to me. After that, things seemed to get better but I was still dealing with sexual addiction. When I entered high school, I began a relationship with a guy and wasn’t healthy. We talked about sex a lot and at one point he exposed himself and I did as well on the webcam. I regretted that experience and I never did it again after learning the dangers of that.

Soon then I started another relationship with a guy, and it really became serious. I considered this Guy my first real boyfriend. He was a older than I was, I was 16 and this guy was 19. We began a long-distance relationship for the next four years. And the relationship wasn’t healthy at all. I thought it entirely was a loving relationship, but it really was a lustful one.

Now I was still addicted to sex, I was still masturbating, and I was still with the other guy I was first with. It was a horrible situation for me. So, after the relationship ended with the first guy, I fully committed myself to the new guy. At first, everything was good. Our relationship was actually healthy. Until I confided in him that I was addicted to sex. And he went ahead and told me he was too. From that point, our relationship when downhill.

We talked about sex every day. And our relationship made my sexual addiction even worse. I thought about prostituting myself because I wanted it bad. And I started looking at porn again and at times we would exchange naked pics. This was a continuing cycle and this is what our relationship consisted of. We never really actually talked about anything other than sex. We argued a lot, because he was always busy because he was in college. And we would make up by talking about sex.

Soon we had just became content with where we were. In our relationship I was always giving or showing him how much I loved him by sending him letters and other things but he wasn’t doing the same. I was giving, and he was taking and not giving back. Then we stopped talking for a few days. These days turned into weeks and I grew frustrated with this.

As time went by, during my sophomore year,I decided I wanted to lose my virginity. It was one of the worse experiences I have ever felt in my life. I went into it thinking it would be love, that it would be nice. But I was wrong. It was painful. Very painful. And while I was having sex, I started bleeding. I thought I was going to die because I lost so much blood. The guy immediately left and I tried to make sense of what was going on.

I went into the bathroom, and I bled everywhere. It literally was like a gruesome crime scene. My blood was all over the bathroom floor and I decided to take a bath to cleanup. I continued to bleed as water filled the tub and I began to feel extremely lightheaded. I turned the water off and I was literally talking a blood bath sitting in my blood. I laid back and closed my eyes.

I felt like I died that day. I was so ashamed of myself that I thought about drowning myself, but fear came over me and I didnt want my mom to come home and see me like that. So afterwards I cleaned up the blood as best as I could and went on with my day as if nothing happened. I feared I was going to get pregnant, but I didn’t. And after all that I still was addicted to sex, and I cheated on my boyfriend again.

Later on, I found out he cheated on me and we argued about it for three months and we broke up. I was very sad, because I believed I deserved it for cheating on him first. But regardless of the sex, we did genuinely love each other. Even though he never showed it. When we broke up I displayed the attitude as if it was nothing, but I was heartbroken. So I sought out with masturbating to take away or cope with the pain. I still dealt with sexual addiction, and by my mother drinking a lot and having her boyfriend around having sex in her room while my sisters and I were in the living room didn’t help.

I was often mad and hurt when my Mom would come out of her room stumbling drunk, I remember she had just got done having sex and she was drunk and she stumbled out of the room and I was cooking in the kitchen and she came up to me and touched me in a uncomfortable way (even though she didn’t mean to) and I pushed her off of me. Immediately I was scared because I didn’t want her to fall. But I went on about my business.

During my junior year of high school, I still continued with my addiction, and I decided to start going back to church. I had grown up in the church and I learned and had instilled in my heart to fear God and surely did fear him. I was so scared of God. I had stopped going and I wanted to go again.

So, a friend of mine was talking to me about her church, and I started going. But little did I know how much of an impact the church would have on me. I found it funny, I was praising God, praying and I wasn’t even saved. At this time, I began to feel God tugging at my heart. I would hear his voice but there were so many other voices and it would drive me crazy and I’d shut out Gods voice.

It wasn’t until a couple of months later when I gave my life to God. I was always stressed about something, and with a recent falling out with a friend I had hooked up with and dealing with the stress of home life and school, I thought I was going to have another nervous breakdown. But the day I got saved, that particular day, it was weird. The atmosphere was weird. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. At church there was a women’s convention and a lot of people attended.

Little did I know that was the night that I would give my life to God. As the night went on, I felt God tugging strongly at my heart. There was an altar call and I saw women being delivered from some of the things I had dealt with. The thought of being set free from my sin made my spirit want to cry out.

Throughout my life I formed the habit of letting emotions, troubles, and pain build up inside of me. Whenever I’d feel the urge to cry, I’d force myself to stop. There would be times when I’d literally feel the urge to cry out, but I’d force myself not to again. So as I sat in church feeling the urge to cry, I tried like the other times to stop it.

But I couldn’t. I knew it was God doing this and no matter how hard I try, I couldn’t. So I let go of the feeling of trying to be in control and I let God take over.

This time and I began to cry. My friend and noticed this and he knew what it meant. So, he helped me up, and he walked me down the stairs to the altar. I sat there and cried. I felt weighted down. But a group of ladies helped me up and they began to pray and they cried with me.

As soon as I had heard, Lord, heal her broken heart I cried out. And at that moment every single hurt I had done, every single hurt that had been done to me came flashing before my eyes. At that moment I knew that was the last time I would feel the pain that again. HALLELUJAH!!!! I was saved! It was the best feeling in the world.