Freedom From Anxiety: Autumn's Faith Journey- Part 1
Hi friends! Today I am excited for us to begin Autumn’s faith journey. To me, Autumn is someone that has so much light and love within her. She pursues the Lord in such an honest and genuine way. I first met her through a friend, and would never have guessed all that she went through when she was younger. I was so greatly blessed to hear her journey. May you be blessed and encouraged by her faith journey as well. Enjoy!
My faith journey is about how God led me to freedom from anxiety. It’s based on the pursuit of the Lord in my heart.
The first seeds of anxiety stemmed all the way back to when my dad left my mom. I was only around four years old when they got divorced. After that it was us three girls: my mom, sister, and me. When mom met a military guy, my sister and I were both uncomfortable. We were mommy’s girls, but now everything no longer revolved around us. Her boyfriend also had two children, which was another big change. In the first year of dating, they uprooted us and moved us to Virginia. I was confused. I didn’t understand why we were leaving when our whole family was in Florida. After moving, my mom’s boyfriend was deployed a lot. Since I didn’t see him often, we didn’t have a chance to develop a relationship.
When I was six or seven, mom and her boyfriend got married. I remember on their wedding day I was hiding behind the bleachers telling my mom, “I don’t want you to do this. It’s us three. We’re not supposed to be four, or five, or six… this is supposed to be us.” I was a flower girl, so it probably was not a good idea since I was holding up the whole wedding. Looking back, I felt it was a bad start to the relationship with my stepdad since I didn’t want him to marry her when I was very young. After that I stuck with my sister, Kayla, even more. She was four years older than me but became my best friend. I went everywhere that she went.
Eventually we ended up coming back to Florida when I was around ten or eleven. I was in 5th grade at the time, and we were living at my grandma’s. We later moved to Mandarin, which was a neighborhood located about 45 minutes away from my grandma’s. I was with my grandparents every other weekend, and that was the only time I would go to church.
When Kayla started going to Mandarin High School she got into a bad crowd. I was already so attached to her that I followed her wherever she went. I thought her ways were the right ways. Whenever I hung out with her, I felt cool and hip. All her friends were smoking weed, out late, and all over town. We were never home.
Meanwhile, my relationship with my stepdad was not going well. I was writing him three-page letters pouring out my emotions about how he made me feel. I told him I didn’t feel loved by him and would ask, “Why don’t you love me? Why am I not good enough?” He would throw the letter away and tell me that I had too many emotions. Even though our relationship was bad, I asked my stepdad if he would adopt me. It was more a call for help. He said that he never would adopt me under the circumstances of our relationship. I felt so unwanted.
I began to bottle up my emotions. My anxiety grew because I would continually be in my mind. Around that time, my sister’s biological dad died. Technically, Kayla was my half-sister. We had the same mom but different dads. She ended up getting a bunch of money from his insurance, so my parents bought her a car. After that, Kayla left home. It went from me being with my best friend to me being at home alone. That’s when the depression grew.
When I was around fifteen, I was going down the wrong path. I didn’t want to be home because I didn’t feel wanted by my stepdad. I didn’t have my own friends because I had always been around Kayla and her friends. She would still come and see me, or I’d sneak out and go out with her and her friends late at night. That’s when I started smoking weed. I was already struggling with anxiety and depression because of everything that I went through. I didn’t know how to express and deal with my emotions because I had learned to bottle them up. Smoking weed became my hero because I didn’t feel or think about anything. I was surrounded by people where I didn’t feel I had to do anything to be accepted.
In ninth grade I became friends with my cousin’s girlfriend, Brooke. She attended the same high school and by tenth grade we became best friends. It was also around that time I developed bad social anxiety. I never wanted to be at school because I didn’t have any friends other than Brooke. She wasn’t the cool girl, but she knew more people than I did. She was not a good influence. It was mostly me and her smoking weed and skipping school. Even when I went to school, I was always high because I never wanted to be there.
My class attendance started getting so bad that I convinced my mom to let me drop out of Mandarin High School after tenth grade. At the start of my junior year, she enrolled me at Catapult Academy instead based on a promise that I would go to school every day. It was an online school that was held in a building down the street from my house. I would get dropped off and be on a computer all day. I didn’t have to be around a lot of people since there were only twelve students at that school. That made it easier for my social anxiety.
Brooke lived right down the street from my parents, so we still hung out. She would pick me up from school and then pick up her brother, Adam, from work. We would go to her house and smoke together. That was how I ended up getting to know him.
At that point in life, I felt my dad never wanted me so why would any man want me? Then it went from my real dad not wanting me to my stepdad not adopting me. I dated a bunch of people to feel loved because I didn’t feel loved in my own household. I felt loved when I was doing drugs and smoking weed because my emotions weren’t there. When I got to know Adam, I thought he was one of the cool kids at school. Soon we began dating.
Even before I knew him, Adam was already seeing doctors about his mental health. He went from smoking weed to doing dabs. It’s purer THC. It gets you extremely high. That accelerated the decline in his mental health. He had anxiety, bipolar disorder, and thoughts in his head. I didn’t really understand what was happening when we were dating. I was only sixteen or so at the time. He would be staring off in space and I would ask, “Bro you good?” I thought he was high, but he was having a mental episode.
Adam began driving me to school and would literally sit in the parking lot waiting for me. He was very controlling and insecure. At some point he stopped taking me to school, so we put tracking on each other’s phones. My tracker began to malfunction. Even though I wasn’t leaving school, it kept saying that I was walking out. He would ask, “Where are you going? What are you doing?” I told him that I had not left school and would send pictures as evidence, but he didn’t believe me. He would say it was an old picture.
Adam and I were fighting every day. It made me anxious. I was already lazy from smoking weed and thought, “Whatever. I can do retail jobs for the rest of my life.” After two or three months I dropped out of eleventh grade to make him happy.
Things would get worse. One day, my mom asked me to stay at home and watch the house over the weekend while they were out of town. I invited Adam to stay with me when I was not supposed to. When they found out, I was kicked out of my home by my stepdad. I was embarrassed and left on a bad note. Even though my mom texted me every day to check on me, I didn’t really make the effort to talk to my parents. I was in love with Adam, and thought I was happy, but at the same time I didn’t know what happy was. The relationship was never healthy.
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