For Jess.

With an absentee father and a manic depressive mother, her next choice was to turn to God. So she did. Becoming quite involved with the church with people she thought were truly good people, she began to think that maybe she could create the family she continually prayed for. But at times, especially when you’re a young girl in a small conservative town, when it feels as though praying just isn’t enough, vocalizing this feeling means having the common and horrible opportunity to be judged by the entire community. What people don’t realize when they have insanely strong conviction in their faith, is the amount of judgment they place on people, as well as how much this judgment negatively affects others.
It tore this young girl apart. She felt no ties or obligations to her family since they had never shown any to her. The church did not feel remotely familial nor welcoming any longer. And her so-called friends didn’t seem to have the ability nor the maturity to understand her frustrations with her life. Moreover, she didn’t feel the need to have to explain herself to anyone. Especially since explaining would merely jog her memory and force her to remember why she felt so shitty all the time in the first place.
But lucky her, she was still hopeful enough to believe her situation could get better. And even luckier, she got to fall in love. However, nothing is perfect and her falling in love was no where near it. Because she was so young at the time, and he was much older, people on the outside assumed the worst. They thought that he was just taking advantage of her, that since the law didn’t approve their relationship it had to be wrong. But if outsiders were so concerned in regards to the intricacies of their relationship why couldn’t they ask the participants in the relationship about them? It is because when we don’t understand something it’s much easier to reject it than to accept it. Because doing the latter forces us to simultaneously accept our naivète.
Eventually, she was able to find friends that accepted and understood her. And while they didn’t quite understand all of her, their constant love and acceptance was all she could ever hope for. These friends would be the people to help her through the most trying times of her life. (As if her childhood and teen years weren’t trying enough.) They would see her through having to break her first love’s heart only to have her own heart broken. Through celebrating independence to the great struggle with the responsibilities that came with it. She would make it through whatever life threw at her. And while others would breakdown, she would paint a smile on her face and pretend that everything was fine, hoping that soon it would no longer have to be an act. ‘We never let them see us cry,’ she had always said. And to the best of her ability, she insured this was so.