cont'd

A journal entry from two months after I'd reached bottom says,

"I've gone weeks in a row having to coax myself out of bed everyday, half the time being unsuccessful. Weeks of struggling through the day, but somehow managing to keep it inside - which is awful. Being a corpse inside, but outside the same, cheerful Amanda as always. My grades have fallen. I've been absent more than not. I've walked the halls as a zombie. I've lied to my family, my best friends. I've cried. God, I've cried so many days. Wondering why? When is this cloud going to lift? Why am I feeling this? I dropped out of high school. I broke up with the first person I ever loved. I lost touch with many of those friends I'd just made."

That hopelessness was there - and strongly - but then there were these moments of awakening. One day I wrote, "I feel like I'm getting spiritual. Like maybe there is someone up there. It's comforting, anyway, to 'talk' to them." But within the week I'd fall again: "My days have been bleak and dark and painful. I've questioned the purpose of getting up each morning." It's like the spiritual battle was raging already. Satan was trying his hardest to hold me down, but God was looking to pull me up.

There's a song that you've probably heard a million times, and I had too. Then one day I was in the car with friends out west [I spent a semester in British Columbia], it came on, and as I listened I just started crying. The singer is exactly where I was when God reached out His hand to me and I finally took it. I didn't know who He was, but I knew I was with Him from then on.

[I'll put the lyrics in. It's Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You"]

I'm standing on a bridge
I'm waitin' in the dark
I thought that you'd be here by now
There's nothing but the rain
No footsteps on the ground
I'm listening but there's no sound

Isn't anyone tryin' to find me?
Won't somebody come take me home
It's a damn cold night
Trying to figure out this life
Won't you take me by the hand take me somewhere new
I don't know who you are but I... I'm with you

I'm looking for a place
searching for a face
is anybody here I know
cause nothing's going right
and everything's a mess
and no one likes to be alone

Isn't anyone tryin' to find me?
Won't somebody come take me home
It's a damn cold night
Trying to figure out this life
Won't you take me by the hand take me somewhere new
I don't know who you are but I... I'm with you

Oh why is everything so confusing
maybe I'm just out of my mind
yea yea yea

It's a damn cold night
Trying to figure out this life
Won't you take me by the hand take me somewhere new
I don't know who you are but I... I'm with you

Take me by the hand take me somewhere new
I don't know who you are but I... I'm with you
I'm with you
I'm with you...

So that was part one...