Senior year didn’t feel like a beginning. It felt like the absence of an ending.

By then, nothing was holding me in place anymore. My mom was gone. My relationship with God was fractured. The church had turned me away. School felt transactional, not relational. And my family had scattered into their own lives.

My father was working out of state, ten hours away. My stepmom went with him. My brother moved out. The relationship I had been in since High school started was ended. The house I grew up in sat mostly empty.

No one was asking where I slept. No one was checking how I was coping. No one was paying attention to how fast I was unraveling. On the outside, I looked functional. I went to school.

I had a job, I showed up. But inside, I was barely holding myself together.

Senior year gave me freedom without protection. Money without guidance. Time without supervision. I had already learned how to numb my mind — now I had the means to do it whenever I needed. What used to be occasional became routine. What used to be contained became constant.

Substances followed me everywhere. Into school. Into work. Into the quiet moments where grief resurfaced and memory refused to stay buried. I wasn’t just chasing pleasure — I was trying to keep myself upright.

The loss I never processed sat heavy in my body. The pregnancy I carried and lost haunted me. The relationship that reshaped me left behind confusion instead of closure.

And the God I had once tried to reach felt distant — or worse, disapproving. I didn’t feel like I was rebelling. I felt abandoned.

Senior year felt like living without a guardrail. Consequences felt abstract. The future felt hypothetical. All that mattered was getting through the day without collapsing under the weight of everything I hadn’t been allowed to grieve.

And the scariest part? It all felt logical.

When you’ve already lost your mother, lost your faith, lost your sense of belonging, and lost the adults who were supposed to protect you — losing control doesn’t feel like destruction. It feels like inevitability.

I made choices I didn’t question because questioning them would have meant slowing down. And slowing down meant feeling everything I had been avoiding. So I stayed numb. I stayed busy. I stayed gone.

Senior year wasn’t the moment everything fell apart. It was the moment there was nothing left to stop it.

THE CLOSING PRAYER

God,

You saw me walking through that year without anchors. You saw how close I was to the edge, even when no one else did. Hold the version of me who didn’t know how to ask for help. Who mistook freedom for safety. Who kept moving because stopping felt unbearable. Thank You for not letting my story end there. Thank you for staying near when I was slipping out of reach.

Amen.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower