One person can change everything

At the age of 9 I experienced my first major loss. We were in Bali, partying hard and living it up when my mums phone rang. She picked it up, answering it with a sigh and moving away from the blaring music. “Hello?” It was my aunty Debby, my mums sister. She ranted on, her strained hollow voice escaping the speakers and within a second I knew something was wrong. Dad dragged me away as mum started screaming, her voice piercing into my memory so that I remember it to this day. My cousin Nickolas was dead. Crashed his car somewhere in New Zealand, his own thoughts and regrets being his reason. From then on, my life steeped down. A year later, after fighting cancer for a gruelling 6 months, my grandfather passed away. By then, I was depressed, unable to control my feelings and often letting them escape without intention and them hurting others. I was struggling to balance life and everything was getting worse. Then covid hit. I was finding it harder and harder to find reasons to live, my depression steering many people away from me including my friends and family. All of my emotions were bottled up tight and I kept them inside me so as not to worry others. Once my dad lost his job, he decided we would travel Australia. I didn’t see this as a vacation, more of a hinderance in my life. I was lonely, depressed and feeling further away from my old bubbly self than ever. Despite being on the trip of a life time and travelling Australia I was far from happy. I felt as if my whole life had just been thrown away by this trip, my education, my independence, my freedom and whatever slithers of friendships I had left. We had been travelling for 4 months, exploring places I had only heard of but never really pictured to be anything much. I missed my family and my home and was regretting my decision to join my family in travelling. By random chance, a family we had known when I was little were staying in the same caravan park as us. There was five of them, Abi, Tim, Nick, Uncle Dave, and Aunty Nicky. My first impression was the whole goody-two-shoes-I’m-perfect thing and I made very little effort to get to know them. Eventually I was half shoved by my parents to socialise and lets just put it straight: I sucked at making friends. I was an awkward and weird person who was 100% different to them, I was much more of a rebel-nothing-scares-me person and yet I was oddly afraid to talk to any of them. I guess they felt the same way about me, because it took two weeks for us to start up a conversation despite the fact that we had begun travelling with one another. All three of them were homeschooled, me being the first non-homeschooled teen that they had really known. Wasn’t that a shock for them. Not only that, they were highly religious as I found out after loosing my crap and letting an arrangement of colourful words out infront of them. Baaaddd idea. So anyway, slowly as we got to know one another I felt the barriers around myself loosen and draw down. Abi and Tim were nothing like the depressed crack-filled teens I was used to and to be frank, I didn’t know what to do about it. A whole part of me I didn’t even know existed opened up, changing my mind set and lifting my spirits. Abi and I were the same age, Tim a few years older. It was great to have another girl around, having had only my three younger brothers to talk to in previous months. After a while, I got to know Tim. He was everything I wasn’t; smart, funny, confident, and he was always smiling. We were literal opposites. But like they say, opposites attract. He showed me the beauty in people and in nature and, day by day, began to pull me out from the dark hole I had been trapped in for years. He made me feel like I mattered. I could open up to him in ways I never had to anyone else, and it filled me with hope. He picked flowers for me when we walked through the lush landscapes of Australia and gave me chocolate and hugs when I was struggling with my feelings. He was the only person who understood me, he was the fresh start I had been unknowingly looking for. Barely two months after first meeting Tim in Darwin, I was a new person. My morals had changed, my view of life, school, people and the world had been shaped to fit who I was as a person. All feelings of regret, doubt, unwantedness, loneliness, depression and anxiety had faded. Meeting Tim gave me hope that I could be something more than what I thought. I felt empowered being around him and Abi, and although we had nothing in common, we could talk for hours about anything and everything. Tim, thank you so much for being such an outstanding, amazing person and for helping me through that tough time. You have inspired me to help others overcome their emotional pain and you have given me strength to do many things I never thought I could. They say hope is the thing with wings, like a bird or an angel. You are my angel <3