My testimony!!!
Here I am to share my testimony. My messy story that God somehow made beautiful. I've learned that our hardships can be an opportunity of God shaping and molding us into the sons and daughters He created us to be. More into His image. I hope that my testimony I just shared, is a reminder of these things. I pray that the Lord will use my story for His glory and that I can encourage others. And I hope you know that your story matters too, truly. 🤍
I grew up in the church like many Christian’s have. But I didn’t start a personal relationship with God until later on when I was around 12 years old. // But that relationship was built and formed out of not so good intentions. It was unhealthy. Things were really complicated.
—I remember when I was 12, there was this time where God like literally opened my eyes up to the real world, showing me how dirty sinful and unclean the world around me was. And how dirty and sinful and unclean I was. I started obsessing over every little thing I did. I became so fixated and obsessed on sin, whether things I did were wrong or right. I had so much spiritual anxiety and fears that really consumed by life. I wasn’t taking care of myself or giving myself compassion. I didn’t let myself rest or take breaks. I was so obsessed with trying to make everything right for Jesus. I felt so much pressure make sure I share the gospel enough, or make sure I do everything I can to make the world a better place and make myself less sinful. Feeling like I had to meet these huge standards for God. That I needed to be a perfect Christian. That I can’t sin, that I thought I was a failure. I was so obsessed I was worried I was going to hell, that I was gonna be punished. So regular Christian things became a trigger cause OCD would keep popping up and telling me so many lies. This what I’m describing is called Scrupulosity, which is religious OCD. I would spend hours in compulsions trying to make up for not being a good enough Christian. Hours in my Bible (even whole entire days) just pushing myself studying God’s word or repetitively praying, and just having so many questions stuck in my head that I’m ruminating over and over again. So I was really struggling with things and it caused problems with my relationship with God. I was living for Him out of fear. And so 12 was just a pivotal age for me because it is when I started my relationship with God but it was just kinda messed up because it was being controlled by the OCD and consumed by that fear. So living my life for God was very difficult. It became a constant fear and thought in my mind, of anything religious that I had to meet the standards of. I put so much pressure on myself. I made things so strict on myself. I know other people relate to these kind of things but mine became so obsessive that it turned into OCD. OCD often attacks the thing that you love most. At that point, I loved and wanted a relationship with God the most. But OCD stole that, it stole the peace and the love I was supposed to be experiencing with God. It breaks my heart looking back seeing how much I struggled, when truly there was a kind and compassionate and good Father and God out there who loved and cared for me. But I just saw the opposite and was really hard on myself.
Zoom back to my childhood. I grew up pretty good and I’m really grateful for that. I did start dealing with some anxiety and OCD and then physically when I was 9 I started getting stomach issues. And so that was kinda the start of my health journey.
12 was when I got some more health issues, dealing with intense migraines that really interrupted my life. And in the next couple of years (after age 12) I started getting more symptoms and pain throughout my body. I felt miserably sick when I was 15, so I went through a lot of testings and figuring things out. I was eventually diagnosed with several other chronic illnesses when I was 16. One is called (POTS) Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. It is a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. So that means the things that are automatically supposed to work in your body, like your heart rate, your breathing, your sweating, your GI system. Like they’re supposed to do their job but they arent doing that, they’re not functioning the way they need to. So the big thing with POTS is that our blood is not circulating enough and so our blood pools to the bottom to our feet. So when we are going from sitting to standing, or an upright position, the blood does not come up through the body to reach the brain to give it oxygen to do that task. Which causes a lot of dizziness, lightheadedness, and a lot of other things. My heart rate would go up to 170 sometimes. Simply for just going from my room to the kitchen to get a drink. Even just trying to get to the bathroom became feeling like it was a 5k. At the same time, I was dealing with nerve pain. And so we got checked out doing other testings. I got a genetic testing that shows I have (CMT) Charcot Marie Tooth, which is a genetic neuromuscular disease. So this disease effects the peripheral nerves in my body which is the hands, arms, feet, and legs. So I have a lot of weakness in those parts of my body. Which then causes issues with my balance and walking, dealing with foot drop. And lastly, another diagnosis I got was Fibromyalgia which is basically widespread body pain and aching. The fatigue of all these things were so hard. It felt like I was wearing weights on my body every movement I made, was so heavy.
That was really difficult for me and my life and it really stopped me in my tracks and made me have to rethink everything and live completely differently. So through these years, I was still dealing with severe anxiety. I didn’t seek help soon enough because 1) I didn’t know it was not normal to experience that much fear and 2) because when I figured it out that I was dealing with this thing called anxiety, I was too afraid to speak up. I’ve always been seen as the shy/quiet kid and I understand that, but people don’t know that there was a lot more going behind the scenes with that. That there was undiagnosed autism, ocd, anxiety. So I didn’t start getting mental health help till I was 16, which is when my depression became a major issue. Since I was being diagnosed with many other physical conditions, that just shook my body and really started effecting me and my life and I had to stop doing a lot of things. I had to focus on going to appointments and testings and medications. It led me into isolation, being homebound, being stuck seeing doctors more then a friend. My life kinda became centered around my health. So when I was 16, my depression got pretty severe at that age and so that was when I actually started seeking help for mental health. I went in a deep dark place and was miserable. And it just lead me to unhealthy habits like self harm and suicidal thoughts. It definitely was the hardest year of my life, age 16. They say that age 16 is supposed to be the best year of your life but for me it was the worst. It was 2019, and I just remember how awful it was and how I did not think I would survive. There were many time I really wanted to completely give up and go to heaven and not have to live on this earth anymore. And I sadly almost tried taking my life from that many times. I’m still here though, only by the grace of God.
But I sought out help from a psychiatrist and a therapist. That was not an easy process, it was very complicated. I did not have the best help, which just complicated things. And so but I addressed the anxiety too. But it wasn’t till I was 17, that I got a diagnosis of OCD. I didn’t really know what was going on when I was 12 and the following years that I continued dealing with OCD. And it just became more severe and debilitating. I kept it a secret when I finally realized okay something is not right here, something is really wrong. And so I was just so scared to speak up. I wish I would have gotten help for my ocd and anxiety earlier on, but like I said I was too afraid, and it had to get to the point of hey my depression is so bad I need help to actually get help for my anxiety and it was put off a lot and not taken seriously. This is something that makes me so passionate about mental health awareness. Because I want others to speak up and have the opportunity to seek help as soon as they possibly can. Waiting and suffering on your own, like I did for a while was awful and I don’t want others to go through that. I want to prevent that. I want people to feel comfortable talking about mental health and illness and not ashamed or put off because of it.
But I had to continue on with life with it, confused and scared. Just heavily covered by OCD and constantly masking myself. I just remember so many nights, sobbing and having panic attacks and breakdowns all by myself and really struggling and barely making it through. So things were just really crazy and a lot of other things happened that were traumatic.
It took me getting a lot worse to then get help. So that was sad. And at this time I was dealing with all the physical stuff at the same time and it was very complex. I was really sick, both physically and mentally. At age 18, I had a gastric emptying scan which showed Gastroparesis. This is a stomach disorder that causes my food to not digest properly or fast enough. So it causes a lot of stomach pain, nausea, struggling to eat. I was so glad to get answers but they kept piling on and I struggled a lot. At age 19, I was diagnosed with autism. I wasn’t diagnosed with autism till I was 19, almost 20. So that was a huge moment in my life. I really felt lost and confused and like I didn’t belong, that I was different from everyone else, I didn’t feel understood all those years growing up. And looking back I can see so many traits of autism that I struggled with. Not all of autism is bad, there’s a lot of good, being autistic can be a beautiful things but it definitely comes with its own set of challenges.
And so it was kinda a breakthrough moment to get that diagnosis, after realized I had it for a while. God really used it to help me feel more understood and comforted. And there was a reason for what I was going through and that I wasn’t alone in this. That really helped me start to heal through deep wounds I went to and really change things for me. 20, I got another physical diagnosed of a condition we had already thought I had—hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS). This is a connective tissue disorder that effects the body’s functions, most likely being the cause of my other health conditions.
Age 16+ have been years of healing and hard work learning how to care for myself, coping with my anxiety/depression religious tendencies, and trying to expose myself to my fears. And it took me having to learn to love myself, in order to accept God’s love in my life. Because I was full of so much hatred towards myself. Relearning how to love myself, is definitely one of the hardest things to do. That was only possible with the love of God. He really taught me and instilled in me what true love was and what a true God He is and who I was truly through him.
So I had to take care of my health along this journey. Though my relationship with God was really in a stuck place, He continued to be faithful and trustworthy and He was what I relied on to get through. It was in those healing years that I really started building my relationship with Christ. I had to learn a lot and learn how to not let my relationship be out of fear but out of love. I was having to learn that God was not a god of hatred anger and disappointment, He was and is a God of love and care and kindness and gentleness. It took a lot of time to work through things.
I had to reteach myself how to live because I was living a completely fear obsessed focused life and it was bad and so I think through this process of struggling alone but then learning to heal I’ve been able to look back and see how good and faithful God has been to me. He’s been with me every step of the way. When I look back and see myself struggling so much: I can just picture Jesus sitting next to me, and reminding me that I was gonna get through, that I was gonna be okay, and that He was with me and was in control. And though in that moment I may not have realized that, I really came to find having true love in God and actually having a relationship where I genuinely wanted for myself to grow with God instead of letting the fear force myself into it.
I think going through more physical chronic illnesses since being diagnosed at 16, it really taught me and forced me into slowing down and pacing myself and taking care of myself and being more easier on myself. I think in a way that was helpful for my mental health because I was constantly having anxiety and dealing with other problems. And so chronic illness physically made me slow down and stop and actually made me realize I needed to take care of my mental health because it has been debilitating and effecting me. It’s like in some way the physical problems gave me time to heal from my mental health problems because I had that time.
I’m 21 now and that’s kinda where my journeys at. I have over 10 illnesses (physical and mental), that I still deal with. I’m grateful for the improvements in some of those, frustrated with the things that aren’t. But I’ve kinda been in a waiting place, into a stuck place, where I feel like God is wanting me to pursue more and more growing closer to Him and healing from the past trauma that I’ve been through. I think the process of healing will be for my life. But I don’t really know where to go next in life, I’m kinda relying on God to show me and answer that. And the waiting can be frustrating, being stuck at home, seeing my friends and family and people on social media pursuing their dreams: of going to college, having their own apartment, or getting married. So it’s been hard on me missing out on all the stuff, even just as simple as the teens years. I missed on living a normal teen life. But maybe I don’t want a regular normal life, I want a unique life story. And God has definitely given me one, not in ways that I wanted to. I didn’t want any of this to happen, but looking back I’m kinda glad that God gave me those trials because they brought me so much closer to him. And I wouldn’t be as close to God as I am if it wasn’t for those struggles that I went through for so many years and continue to do so. It’s changed me for the better. It’s shaped me, disciplined me, and just really placed on my heart that the pain I’m going through has purpose. And that’s the name of my Christian Instagram and blog. Your pain has a purpose. Writing (like through poetry) has been a great way for me to express my feelings.
When my body started getting sick, I felt so weary and hopeless. But what was different now is that I had Christ in my life to help me. Even if my circumstances were bad, He was good and there to give me strength and hope. He was there to help me fight my battles. He gave my pain purpose.
It’s definitely been a long journey. It’s hard just to think of, just to process. I still have a lot more healing to go through, a lot more pain and symptoms to try to manage and cope with, as well as mental health struggles. But I just try to remember how far I’ve come, how far God’s brought me. I’ve come a long way and I try to remember how grateful I am for that and how each step of the way God was with me. Even when I didn’t feel like I was going to make it, God pulled me through to the other side. Even when I kept falling, God lifted me up onto His right hand and called me worthy, called me seen, loved, and beautiful. My health physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually has been quite a mess but it’s been a beautiful mess. God has crafted something huge out of my life and I don’t know where he’s gonna take me. It’s scary to try to think about the future. I’m scared, but I do trust in Him. I’m in a better place then I was many years ago. It’s been a long journey. And the journey will continue but God pulls me through and has shown His victory, His power. Without his love I would be no where. Without him I would not be alive today. He saved me. Praise the Lord!
Now, it hasn't been easy, my faith has been really shaken at times, but Christ always welcomes me back into His loving arms. I’m so grateful for who He is and all He’s done. Do I wish I didn't have to go through all these struggles, yes. But I wouldn’t trade it back because I’ve been able to experience the Lord in a deeper way. A painful journey with God is better than a painless journey without Him. And one day all our pain will be gone and we will get to spend eternity with Christ. What a great joy and hope!
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! - 2 Corinthians 5:17
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