Where you invest your love, you invest your life.

                Growing up, college always was the plan. But it wasn’t until the summer before my junior year of high school that I realized college may not be the only option. My grades were bad and my motivation to improve my grades was nonexistent. It took me physically and emotionally hitting rock bottom to realize something was wrong. I couldn’t eat, I didn’t sleep and leaving the house for school became the scariest idea in the world. Being alone became my own personal horror story, and instead of Freddy being in my dreams to terrorize me, it was my biological father. It took me missing over 52 days of school to realize that something bigger was going on with me, and I couldn’t keep hiding it.

                Telling my mom about everything was so hard. I didn’t want her to think I was a freak because I knew I already thought that about myself enough for everyone. But I needed answers and I needed a solution, but I didn’t know what I was asking. I was your stereotypical high school student. Football games, dances, parties, and a group of people I called my friends to match. It was all so plastic and disgusting to me. I needed out.

                That year I found out I had a severe anxiety disorder and depression. Because of these disorders affecting me and my body so much, it was easier for the doctors to then find out I had Crohns disease. Once I started to get my problems taken care of, I realized that the reason it was all so bad was because I wasn’t ever being the person I was supposed to be, I was being who everyone around me thought I should be. When I left the public high school I attended to started school online, I cut off all of my hair, started studying Buddhism, cut out the people who weren’t really my friends and began to turn all of my emotions into art.

                Writing and painting had always brought me to a place beyond calm, beyond serenity and beyond solace. It takes me to my own world where everything is still and at ease. It made me realize, that I had tried so hard to fit in, when the place I fit in best was with a pen and paper, or paint and canvas. I started to wonder who else may have gone through everything I did, and who wouldn’t have the guts to get out the way I did.

                Starting an organization occurred to me, but the time and energy it would take was far beyond anything I could ever dedicate while going to college. So I started thinking about what had guided me along my very rough and bumpy road. And it occurred to me instantly; books. Reading was my escape from the time I was young. It’s being able to lose myself somewhere else when my life has been too hard to deal with. I remembered a friend of mine once brought up being an author to me and it seemed ridiculous at the time, but as time has gone on it’s started to become the most obvious answer; if I wanted to be able to help individuals like me, I should target myself when I was younger.

                Writing a book about what I went through has been one of my most passionate goals. If writing a book about all of the awful things I went through and how I’ve come out on the other side could help just one person, my life would be fulfilled. Seeing yourself in the mirror has been one of the biggest difficulties for me, because you’re not really seeing the real you. It takes being able to step outside your own self, and away from whatever situations you’re dealing with to be able to see the person you’re being, and decide if it’s the person that you truly are.