Lost

So I've hit 5000 views. According to the little ticker I've got at the bottom of the blog this has taken me 6 months, 2 weeks and 3 days. It really doesn't seem like that long. It makes me realise how much changes over time. When I started discerning I thought I'd have graduated university this summer. Now that's not the case and I graduate next summer.

I don't like to talk about it but I lived in England before I came to university. It was from when I was 13 until I finished my GCSE's at 16. It was the first time I had lived in England and I was sent to an all-girl's high school several miles away from where I lived, it was the only school that had space for me. I spent three years at that school and I was severely bullied. My teachers all knew what was going on but did nothing to stop it. A few even just stood and watched without saying a word. I begged my mother to send me to a different school but she refused. I was totally alone. That school broke me in a way I can't possibly explain. I'd lost all hope in life and in anything.

I truly believe that my faith saved me. We moved overseas again and my mother met a Catholic woman at work who lived down the road from us. She offered to take me to Mass with her and she helped me enrol in RCIA since I had never been confirmed. She took me to the classes and was my sponsor. She was truly an angel.

People always say that at university you find yourself. For me it was the opposite. University made me lose myself. I got lost in a huge campus and in huge classes. Not only that but I was lost in a sea of people who I had absolutely nothing in common with. I had moved halfway across the world to come to university and I was homesick. In addition, I was placed in the dorms that are on the complete other side of the city from the rest of the university. I didn't get on with the people in my dorm, who were more interested in getting drunk and high than anything else. I was left feeling confused, lonely and abandoned. Everything that I had experienced in my first stint in England came back, just as I had feared it would. Once again I lost all hope.

And again it look finding my faith again to find myself again. I realised how much my faith is truly who I am. My entire identity is ingrained in what I believe.  Without my faith I am lost because without it I have nothing.