Not because I wanted to rebel against religion. Not because I stopped believing in God. If anything, it’s because I believe in Him enough to wonder if we’ve made following Him more complicated than He ever intended.

The thought always comes back to me in the quiet.

What if God never asked us to belong to a religion? What if He simply asked us to belong to Him?

I know that question makes people uncomfortable. Maybe it even sounds wrong. But it’s a question that refuses to leave me, and I’ve learned that some questions deserve to be explored instead of buried.

Every time I read the Bible, I notice something.

Jesus never sat people down and said, “Join a religion.”

He didn’t tell them to choose a denomination. He didn’t divide people into groups. He didn’t ask them what church they attended.

He simply said, “Follow me.”

Two words.

Not “Follow this institution.”

Not “Follow these traditions.”

Just… follow me.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve built so many walls around faith that we’ve forgotten what was standing in the middle all along.

God.

I look around today and I see hundreds of denominations, each believing they understand God the best. Different traditions. Different rules. Different ways of worshipping. Sometimes those differences bring beauty. Other times they create division.

People argue over who is right.

Who has the truth.

Who worships correctly.

Who belongs.

And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I wonder if Jesus is still saying the same thing He said over two thousand years ago.

“Follow me.”

Maybe faith was never supposed to be about labels.

Maybe it was never about introducing ourselves as Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, Orthodox, Anglican, or anything else before introducing ourselves as people who love God.

Maybe those labels help some people grow closer to Him.

Maybe they don’t.

I don’t know.

And that’s something I’ve become comfortable admitting.

I don’t have all the answers.

I’m not writing this because I think I’ve figured God out.

I’m writing this because I haven’t.

Because I think questioning isn’t the opposite of faith.

Sometimes it’s the beginning of it.

I’ve always believed that if God created our minds, then He isn’t afraid of our questions. He already knows every thought before we think it, so why would He be offended by an honest search for truth?

Maybe He’s less concerned with whether we ask questions and more concerned with whether we’re willing to listen when the answers come.

The older I get, the more I realize that faith feels less like certainty and more like trust.

Trusting God even when I don’t understand everything.

Trusting Him enough to keep seeking instead of pretending I already know.

When I imagine standing before God one day, I don’t imagine Him asking me what denomination I belonged to first.

I imagine Him looking at my heart.

Did I love people?

Did I forgive when it was difficult?

Did I show compassion?

Did I choose mercy over pride?

Did I know Him or did I only know about Him?

Maybe I’m completely wrong.

Maybe there are pieces I’m still missing.

But I’d rather spend my life sincerely searching for God than blindly accepting every tradition without ever asking why.

My faith isn’t becoming smaller because I ask these questions.

It’s becoming more personal.

More intentional.

More honest.

Maybe religion helps many people find God, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But I don’t want to mistake the path for the destination.

Because at the end of it all, I don’t believe my soul is searching for a religion.

I believe it’s searching for God.

And perhaps that’s where faith has always begun not with a label, not with a building, not with a tradition…

…but with a quiet voice that still echoes through every generation:

“Follow Me.”

I have spent so much of my life wondering what everyone else has that I don’t. What makes them the first phone call, the first invitation, the first person someone thinks of when something good happens? What makes people fight to keep them while I have always felt like someone they could leave behind without much thought? I have never felt hated. In some ways, I think that would have been easier to understand. Instead, I have felt forgettable. Easy to replace. Easy to postpone. Easy to keep around until someone better walked into the room.

There is something quietly devastating about being almost loved. Almost wanted. Almost enough. You become a placeholder in stories that were never written with you in mind. You sit at tables where no one saved you a seat, and you stand in rooms where everyone notices when someone else arrives but hardly anyone notices when you leave. You begin wondering if you’ve somehow mastered the art of being invisible not invisible enough to disappear, but invisible enough to never truly matter.

The hardest part isn’t even the rejection. Rejection gives you an answer. It tells you where you stand. The hardest part is hope. Hope keeps convincing you that next time will be different. Every unanswered message becomes, “Maybe they’re busy.” Every cancelled plan becomes, “Maybe something came up.” Every broken promise becomes another excuse you make on their behalf. You become fluent in translating silence into love and inconsideration into affection. You lower the bar so many times that eventually it’s buried beneath the ground, and somehow people still manage to step over it.

I spent years believing that if I loved people hard enough, they would finally choose me. If I was kinder, quieter, funnier, more understanding, less emotional, less needy, less… me… surely someone would finally see my worth. So I became easy. Easy to postpone. Easy to disappoint. Easy to forget. I smiled through things that shattered me because I didn’t want to seem difficult. I laughed when I was the joke because I thought being laughed at was better than not being seen at all. I apologized for asking for the bare minimum and thanked people for giving me tiny pieces of themselves while I handed them my whole heart. Somewhere along the way, I became grateful for crumbs because I had forgotten what a full meal of love and consideration was supposed to feel like.

Being treated like a joke leaves wounds no one else can see. At first, you laugh with everyone else because that’s easier than admitting it hurts. But every joke leaves behind another tiny crack. They say, “We’re only joking,” and everyone moves on, but those words don’t disappear when the laughter ends. They follow you home. They echo in your mind long after everyone else has forgotten they ever said them. Eventually, you stop wondering whether they’re joking and start wondering if maybe they’re right. Maybe you really are too much. Maybe you’re too sensitive. Maybe you’re just someone people can never take seriously.

Being someone’s last choice changes the way you see yourself. You stop reaching for opportunities because you’ve already convinced yourself they’ll belong to someone else. You hesitate before sending a message because you don’t want to bother anyone. You stop asking to be included because you’ve memorized what it feels like to be forgotten. You celebrate the smallest bits of attention because you’ve been taught not to expect more. You start believing that consideration is something you have to earn and that love only belongs to people who deserve it more than you do.

Then something even sadder happens. You stop waiting for other people to overlook you because you’ve started overlooking yourself. You become the last person to choose yourself. You tell yourself your feelings can wait. You convince yourself that your needs aren’t important. You silence your own voice before anyone else gets the chance to. That’s what being unchosen does. It teaches you to participate in your own disappearance.

People often think heartbreak only exists in romantic relationships, but some of the deepest heartbreak comes from friendships, from family, from people you trusted with pieces of your heart. Heartbreak is realizing you’ve been calling people your friends while they’ve been calling you whenever everyone else is busy. It’s realizing you’ve spent years showing up for people who wouldn’t even notice if you stopped. It’s understanding that they don’t love you enough to choose you, but they don’t let you go enough for you to heal. They keep you close enough to need you but far enough to never truly value you. Being someone’s convenience is one of the loneliest places a person can live because they don’t leave, yet they never really stay.

For a long time, I thought the question was, “Why doesn’t anyone choose me?” But I don’t think that’s the right question anymore. The real question is, “Why have I spent so many years begging people to choose someone they’ve already decided to overlook?” There is a difference between being unseen and standing in front of people who refuse to look. I have confused those two things for far too long.

I don’t want relationships that feel like auditions anymore. I don’t want to wonder where I stand every single day. I don’t want to beg for consideration that should have been given freely. I want friendships where my absence would be noticed, conversations where I feel heard, and love that doesn’t leave me questioning whether I matter. I want to know what it feels like to be chosen without competition, to be loved without conditions, and to be remembered without reminders.

Maybe healing begins when we stop confusing being tolerated with being treasured. Maybe it begins when we stop chasing people who only keep us around because it’s convenient. Maybe it begins when we understand that our worth has never depended on someone else’s ability to recognize it.

I am slowly learning that my value was never diminished by the people who failed to see it. I was worthy before they overlooked me. I was worthy while they overlooked me. And I will still be worthy long after I stop waiting for them to finally choose me.

If they never chose me, that is not a reflection of my worth. It is only a reflection of what they were unable or unwilling to see.

And maybe, after all these years of waiting for someone else to choose me, the person I’ve been waiting for has been myself all along.

It’s of looking for him.

I remember standing in my neatly pressed school uniform during graduation in primary school. The chairs were filling up with parents, cameras flashed from every direction, and children ran into the arms of the people who had come to celebrate them.I kept looking every time another adult walked through the gate, a part of me wondered if maybe it was him. Maybe he was just running late. Maybe he’d surprise me. Maybe, just this once, I’d get to point at someone in the crowd and proudly say, “That’s my dad.”

He never came.

I told myself it didn’t matter.

But children always notice who’s missing.

Years passed, and I carried that same quiet hope into high school.

Prize-giving days.

School events.

Moments that were supposed to become memories.

Every single time, I found myself doing the same thing I’d done as a little girl searching the crowd without even realizing it ,It became a habit.Not because he had ever shown up before but because hope is stubborn, especially when you’re a child waiting for someone who is supposed to love you.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t just waiting for my father.

I was waiting to feel chosen.

The truth is, my father had already started breaking our family long before I was born ,my parents’ relationship was built on conflict instead of peace. Arguments filled their home, and one of those arguments ended with my mother suffering a broken hand after he beat her I never witnessed that moment but I grew up living inside the aftermath of it.Trauma has a way of reaching children, even when they never saw the beginning by the time I was old enough to understand what had happened, the damage had already become part of my life.

My mother never had the luxury of grieving the family she had hoped for.

She had children to raise.

Bills to pay.

Mouths to feed.

Dreams to protect.

Without ever asking for it, she became both mother and father.She carried responsibilities that should have belonged to two people, somehow making sure we never went without love, even when we went without so many other things.When people tell me I’m strong, I know exactly where I inherited that strength from.

It wasn’t from the man who left.

It was from the woman who stayed.

As I grew older, something became painfully clear.

My father hadn’t disappeared from the world.

He had simply disappeared from ours.

He had time.

He had energy.

He had love to give.

It just wasn’t being given to me or my siblings.

Watching him choose his other children felt like watching someone hand out pieces of themselves while pretending you didn’t exist.

They had birthdays with their father.

They had memories with him.

They had the version of him I spent years hoping would show up for me.

I remember turning eighteen.

People say eighteen is special.

It’s the beginning of adulthood.

A milestone.

A day you never forget.

Mine came and went without my father’s voice.

No phone call.

No message.

Nothing.

What hurts even more is realizing that my own father doesn’t even know the day I was born.

Not the month.

Not the date.

Not the child he helped bring into this world.

There was a time when that truth made me question myself.

I wondered if I had done something wrong.

If maybe I wasn’t enough.

If maybe I was too easy to leave behind.

But children are never responsible for being abandoned, adults are responsible for abandoning them.Even now, years later, his absence still echoes through parts of my life.It shows up in the fear that people I love will leave ,It shows up in the way I sometimes question whether I’m worth choosing,It shows up in moments where reassurance feels impossible to believe.

Abandonment doesn’t always leave visible scars.Sometimes it settles quietly inside you and calls itself normal,If there’s one person who deserves every bit of recognition in my story, it’s my mother.

She celebrated every achievement, no matter how small.

She sat through graduations.

She showed up for school events.

She applauded loudly enough to make up for the silence beside her.

She became my safe place when life constantly reminded me of who wasn’t there.

For years, I thought my story was about the father who left.Now I realize it’s also about the mother who refused to,and while my father may never know the day I was born, my mother remembers every detail of the day my life began.Maybe that’s why, despite everything, I survived.

I was raised by someone who chose me every single day.

She doesn’t know that she’ll make it to adulthood. She doesn’t know that one day she’ll be able to put words to the pain that once felt impossible to explain. She only knows that every morning feels heavier than the last, that mirrors have become strangers, and that silence has become her safest place.People often say childhood is supposed to be the happiest time of your life.I don’t remember mine that way I remember surviving it.This is the story of the girl I was, the pain I carried, and the years I’ve spent learning that surviving and healing are not the same thing.

I was only thirteen years old ,at thirteen I should have been worried about school, friends, music, and what I wanted to be when I grew up. Instead, I was carrying emotions that felt far too heavy for someone my age. I didn’t understand what was happening inside my mind, and I didn’t have the words to explain it.The hardest part wasn’t that I was hurting It was that I believed I had to hurt alone.From the outside, I looked like any other teenager. I laughed when everyone else laughed. I answered, “I’m fine,” whenever someone asked how I was doing. I became incredibly good at hiding the truth.

Inside, I was drowning.

Every day felt like I was carrying an invisible weight on my chest. The sadness followed me everywhere. My thoughts became my biggest enemy. I questioned my worth, my appearance, and whether anyone would ever truly understand me.I didn’t know how to ask for help So I stayed silent around that time, I cut my own hair.

To some people it might have looked impulsive, but to me it was something deeper. I didn’t recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror anymore. I wanted to change something I could see because I had no idea how to change everything I couldn’t I wasn’t trying to become someone else ,I was trying to escape the pain of believing I wasn’t enough.Looking back now, I realize that what I needed wasn’t judgment.I needed someone to notice someone to ask twice when I said I was okay.

Someone to remind me that I didn’t have to carry everything by myself.

When you’re struggling at that age, your world becomes very small. You start believing that the pain you’re feeling is all there will ever be. You stop imagining a future because you’re too busy trying to survive the present.

The loneliness changes you.

It steals parts of your personality.

It convinces you that you’re a burden.

It whispers lies that sound like facts.

Over time, I became disconnected from myself. Some days I felt overwhelmed by emotions that seemed impossible to control. Other days I felt emotionally numb, as though I was watching my life from a distance instead of truly living it.

I wish I could tell my thirteen-year-old self that those feelings wouldn’t last forever.

I wish I could tell her that healing would be slow, messy, frustrating, and beautiful all at once.

Because healing isn’t one decision It’s a thousand quiet decisions that no one else sees.It’s getting through one more day ,It’s choosing to reach out instead of shutting down,It’s learning to replace self-criticism with compassion, even if only for a moment.

And sometimes, it’s starting over after you’ve stumbled.

For a long time, I believed that struggling again meant I had failed.

Now I understand something different.

Recovery is not measured by perfection.

It is measured by the courage to keep trying.

Every time I choose to keep going, I reclaim a small part of myself that pain once convinced me I’d lost forever.

If I could sit beside the thirteen-year-old version of me today, I wouldn’t ask her why she was hurting.

I would simply hold her hand.

I’d tell her that she isn’t broken.

I’d tell her that she deserves love without having to earn it.

I’d tell her that one day she’ll write about this—not because the pain defined her, but because surviving it taught her the value of hope.

I’m still healing.

Some days are easier than others.

Some memories still hurt.

Some scars are invisible.

But healing has taught me that my story is so much bigger than the chapters that nearly convinced me it was over.

If you’re reading this and you see yourself in my words, I hope you know this:

You are not weak.

You are not attention-seeking.

You are not beyond hope.

You deserve support, kindness, and the chance to heal.

And even if today feels impossibly heavy, it does not have to be the end of your story.

I’m living proof that the thirteen-year-old who believed she would never feel okay again could grow into someone who still carries those memories ,but is no longer defined by them.

This isn’t just a story about pain.

It’s a story about survival.

And, little by little, it’s becoming a story about hope.

That’s the strange thing about bullying. Eventually, the people who hurt you leave. But sometimes their voices don’t.

I would spend far too long staring at mirrors, trying to figure out what everyone else saw. On some days I avoided mirrors completely because I couldn’t bear the disappointment. My appearance seemed to change every time I looked. A photo someone else loved could make me feel sick. A reflection in a shop window could ruin my entire day.Then came something I didn’t even have words for at first: face dysmorphia.I became obsessed with tiny details that other people never noticed. My nose looked different every day. My jaw seemed uneven. My skin never looked good enough. I’d compare photos, angles, lighting, and reflections, convinced that one of them showed the “real” me.

The exhausting part is that I never knew which version to believe.

People would compliment me, and I genuinely couldn’t understand what they were seeing. I wasn’t fishing for reassurance. I simply couldn’t match their version of me with the one that existed in my head.

Living with body dysmorphia isn’t vanity.

It’s not spending hours looking in the mirror because you think you’re beautiful. It’s spending hours because you’re desperately trying to understand why you feel so wrong.

It’s canceling plans because you can’t stand the thought of being seen.

It’s taking dozens of photos and deleting every single one.

It’s comparing yourself to strangers until your self-esteem disappears.

It’s wondering if everyone else notices the flaws you’re convinced are impossible to miss.

Most people don’t see the mental exhaustion. They only see someone who’s “insecure.” They don’t see the constant battle happening inside your mind.

Healing hasn’t been linear.

There are days when I feel comfortable in my own skin. There are days when I don’t recognize the person looking back at me. I’m learning that both can exist without defining my worth.

I’m also learning something I wish eight-year-old me had known: cruelty says more about the person speaking than the person being spoken to.

If you’re reading this and you’ve ever felt trapped inside a body that never seems good enough, I want you to know you’re not alone. Whether your struggles came from bullying, comparison, social media, or something else entirely, your pain is real.

The words people said to us may have shaped our thoughts, but they don’t have to shape our future forever.

I’m still learning to meet my reflection with kindness instead of criticism.

Some days I succeed.

Some days I don’t.

But unlike the eight-year-old version of me, I now know that my value was never supposed to be measured by someone else’s opinion of my body.

And maybe that’s where healing begins.

They always do.There's a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from watching relationships slowly decay not because you stopped caring, but because you never quite knew how to show that you did. I hold affection like a fragile object inside my chest, terrified that if I try to offer it, my hands will ruin it somehow .Hands made of knives are not meant to hold delicate things so people leave.And every goodbye onfirms what they already believed about me. That I am distant. That I am cold. That I am something monstrous wearing a human face.If only they knew how loudly my heart screams beneath the metal.

If only they understood that beneath the machinery and the carefully constructed mask is someone desperately trying to feel human enough to be loved.But broken machines don't inspire patience.They get discarded and sometimes I wonder if they were right all along if maybe I really am the monster they named me. Because if I were truly human, surely love wouldn't feel this impossible to give.Yet the cruelest truth remains the same.

I feel everything.

Far more than anyone will ever know