God, I desperately need you to search me right now. I need to know where my priorities lie and where I’m going wrong. My anxieties are getting the best of me and I’m over-analyzing and making up situations in my head and they haven’t even happened. I’m creating scenarios that aren’t even real and it’s because you all keep messing with my head. You are all so LOUD today and it’s getting to be a little much. I’m being pulled one way and then the other. A voice of reason followed by a voice of toxicity. You make me stop, you scream my name and I freeze because it sounds like you are right next to me. I calm, I dissociate, and I listen.

I sometimes don’t understand this disorder. I am so extremely uplifted, happy, and feeling on top of the world and then another voice and it’s a drastic change of character. I want to know. What is it we really want? I have a feeling only a handful of you want to keep up a life of uncertainties and abuse. WHY?! I don’t care if that’s all we’ve known, it’s not what we are about to continue to know. I know you are frightened, trying to make things over complicated and difficult to move on, and I am trying so hard to make you see we are so much better than all of that. We are better than shot after shot of empty feelings, bruises, and mental instability. We are more than being disrespected and never being thought of first. I am sick and tired of being number two in my life. I am tired of being put on the backburner, being left wondering what in the hell did I do to deserve this?! I am so angry and I don’t even know what all about. These emotions sometimes are just not my own but they are being felt so deeply by someone else that they release themselves into my own mix of feelings.

I feel like I’m going crazy when I’m not allowed to move on from a thought and I’m being made to dwell on it. I can’t find ways to detour myself from it and I feel helpless and then I become anxious and I feel like my chest has so much pressure that I want to pass out. I don’t know how I’m even typing any of this. My heart is hurting because I feel my love draining, I’m being squeezed in so many directions and I feel like giving up. I can’t stand having so much love and it going unnoticed or being shrugged off. I, in good faith, can’t do it anymore. I can’t feel this way anymore and I’m not about to go drastically about things because it would kill Bets.

No one is going to put anymore hurt on her. It stops now. I know what she aspires after. She doesn’t want to be alone and is trying so hard to go to God before anyone else. Humanity is such a complex thing and a struggle to do what is right all the time. It’s confusing and I am living proof.

Search my heart and help it to calm down and meditate on your words, Lord. I know what I want and to come to you with it all is so scary. I want to move back, I want to go through my divorce, I want to be with the man I want to be with, I want to be a good mother, I want to be a woman after God’s own heart, I want to lead women and be on the front lines of this war, I want so much and I am being pulled in so many directions that the directions coming from him is so blurred. Where am I supposed to be? How am I supposed to feel? Is what I’m doing with my life what you intend for me? Do I just keep living and feeling this way and over complicate and ruin what I’ve got? How can I calm down when my heart is racing, feeling my pulse in every part of my body. I feel so helpless. I can’t stop shaking and I don’t feel real. I don’t like watching myself and looking into my own eyes to see the fear, the hurt, the sadness, the broken, the happy, the gloss over them. Numb.

I want to work through this feeling right now because I don’t think I can take feeling this way a second more. I want to feel at peace with myself and my emotions. I want us to all get along and understand it’s okay to feel what you are feeling. We are here to protect every single part of you. There’s nothing more we want than for your safety, your peace of mind, and your participation in communicating with us. You are really good at putting up your walls and ear muffs when you are hearing things you don’t want. I promise it won’t get easier if you don’t deal with what we need to tell you. What you need to work through. Relationships can’t work unless you work with yourself. You need to take the time for you and stop giving so much of yourself. I know you think it’s because you aren’t wanted, but stop and think, Bets. What are others going through? Almost all the time it’s what they are struggling with, what they are going through, you’ve done nothing wrong. All you can do is hang on the sidelines and be tagged in when you are wanted or needed. Bets, we’ve been doing it our whole life, what’s going to change now?

God has you here for a reason and it’s so much bigger than ourself. I think you know exactly what it is you are here for and you don’t want to admit what a lonely and sometimes numb reason. You can give as much of yourself as possible but Bets, not everyone is going to give just as much back. Do not change who you are for anyone. You are a unique, gifted, and talented woman. You have so much to offer in this life and the ones who realize it will be forever impacted by you. The hold you have over some is ridiculous but you never make it go to your head. You think so little of yourself and it’s time to change that aspect. Please re-read this over and over and realize that we see the woman you truly are. You won’t ever know anyone like yourself and you need to start loving and seeing yourself the way others do. Can you do that for me?

Lord, I ask you once more, with clarity in my heart and reasoning in my head, search me. Show me the road I’m to be heading down. Place your precepts into my life and help me to abide by them as best as humanly possible. Use me. Guide me in where I’m supposed to be. Who I’m supposed to be. You see exactly who I am and you know who we are. I wouldn’t be this way if you didn’t intend it to be. You gave me alters to help me live to help me survive. Why I had to wait so long to figure all of this out, only you know that answer. Please help me with the answers because right now, Lord, all I’ve got is questions. -Bets/Autumn/Jason