Faith.

"There comes a time when every life goes off course. In this desperate moment you must choose your direction. Will you fight to stay on the path while others tell you who you are? Or will you label yourself? Will you be honored by your choice? Or will you embrace your new path? Each morning you choose to move forward or to simply give up." - Lucas 

I choose to get up and move forward. My life has gone off course several times. The worst of those periods was between my junior year of high school and my freshman year of college. Now my entire life was not off course and from the outside most people would have never known but I was lost, and still am dealing with the side effects from it.

During my junior year of high school I was dealt a staggering blow, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Now because of a history of breast cancer running in the family they caught it very early, it was no bigger than the size of a pen head, but hearing the words "I have cancer" come out of your mothers mouth is something that I do not wish upon my worst enemy. She went through treatment and the cancer has been in remission for over 5 years now. 

During my senior year of high school my best friends mother died after a long battle with breast cancer. For as long as I had known her, she had been dealing with this. When she took a turn for the worst me and our other friend were at the hospital all night and we all spent the night together just down the road from the hospital. The next morning we found out that she had passed away in her sleep during the night. I was there with her most of the next several days from sitting at her house to the funeral and beyond. 

None of us who were there we ever the same. Her death had a profound impact on all of us. I tried everything I could think of to help her. We still had so many milestone moments to face and I knew she would have wanted her mother there. We all grew into one big family unit. I took myself out of that unit after some drama with her and an ex of mine and I have always regretted that because there were so many times that I bet she could have needed me and I turned my back on her.

I will always be at a higher risk for breast cancer and always be one that they check extra carefully. But I'm not going to let this risk ruin the rest of my life. A couple of days ago I was having symptoms that I manipulated in my head to be symptoms of cancer (I blame webmd for helping this) but after talking to my mother we determined that the shingles that I had last summer has moved causing a lot of the symptoms. (Don't ask me how I got shingles, and yes they are an old person aliment) But having that thought process in my head of being 23 years old and facing something like cancer got me thinking about all of the people in this world who are facing cancer and similar life threatening diseases and how they could be facing the end of their lives. What would I do in that situation? 

In all honesty no body is guaranteed tomorrow, and if that's the case then what we make of today is what matters. So I have vowed to myself to make the most out of all of the today's I get. Fear is not going to be an option. I'm going to live life to the fullest. I don't know how many more days that I am going to have on this earth and I want all of them to matter. Death is a fact of life. One day we are all going to face it but it isn't something that we should dwell on. We miss those who have gone before us but we must live the rest of our life with the memory of them in our hearts.

I got a tattoo of a cross on my wrist to remind myself to always have faith. Faith in God, in love, in life, in dreams, in people, in myself. I have faith that everyday that I am allowed to wake up that I will face that day and not give up. I remind myself to have faith because we all have moments of weakness. Moments when we don't believe that it will all work out, that we think we are facing more than we can handle, that we just want to give up. I'm not going to give up anymore. I'm going to use my faith to fight like hell to get to where I want to go. Through faith I will succeed. I will succeed in giving everything my all, in never giving up, and waking up each morning and choosing to face the day. That is all I can do, no more, no less.