The Choices We Make

Farther Away

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Mission trips are supposed to bring you closer to God. But if you're ignoring everything God has to say, they don't do much good. When I got home from Arizona I went back to being the same me I had been before. I was angry, I was hungry, and I was a two-faced fake Christian. I still went to youth group but it was usually right after Damien and I had gotten done fooling around. I would tell him sometimes that I didn't want to do that before church, but he never cared about what I wanted. It was all about him and he made sure it stayed that way.

One day he told me I was a selfish brat and that I didn't deserve him . Of course he used harsher words than brat but I can't repeat those. One day he texted me and told me that I should appreciate everything he did for me and that out of all the other girls he could have had he chose me. I was so mad but mostly I was just torn apart. I was too weak to stand up for myself so I just let him treat me like filth. I lost all respect for myself. And he didn't even care. As the anorexia got worse, he ended up encouraging me to starve myself. It even got to the point that he was doing it himself to egg me on and encourage me to destroy my body. I was quickly losing myself now and I saw no light at the end of the tunnel. I felt too guilty to come back to God, so I stayed away and drifted farther.

People started to see the change in me and even though I knew it was a bad change, I did nothing to stop the awful darkness that was growing inside of me. I lost friends and it seemed like no one cared anymore, not even him. I told myself that he loved me, but the worst lies are the ones you tell yourself. I purposely blinded myself, too broken to handle the truth of what I was becoming. I had hardened my heart and it took forever to melt it. Only God could do that, and I wasn't letting him.

Damien got jealous when I wanted to spend time with my friends. He hated me doing things with anyone other than him. It was like he became my boss, dictating and deciding where I would go, what I would do, and even what I would wear. If he wasn't happy, I wasn't happy. Because if he didn't get what he wanted he made my life a living hell.

One day over the summer while he was visiting his dad two hours away, I went to the movies with my friend and her boyfriend. When Damien found out, he flipped. He told me that he couldn't believe I would go behind his back like that. When I tried to explain to him that I didn't even sit beside the guy because he was my friend's boyfriend, he wouldn't let me get a word in. For the next week, he wouldn't even speak to me. I got no text messages from him except angry ones telling me that I better apologize. The thing was, I had already apologized profusely a ridiculous amount of times. I should not have been the one apologizing, but I was always apologizing to him for his own mistakes and outbursts.

His anger was out of control. Day by day the situation got worse. And day by day I became more and more of a puppet, with Damien pulling the strings.