When You Want Everything to Just STOP

“I just want everything to stop. I just want to be done.”

Those sentences are pretty much what’s been running through my mind for the past couple months. You know when everything just gets so overwhelming. It feels like everyone wants a piece of you and everyone wants you to completely devote yourself to them. It doesn’t help that I’m a perfectionist, and I probably expect ten times more out of myself than what anyone else does.

I love stories. In all the craziness of my life, I can always find a story that totally mirrors what I’m going through. I believe that stories have the power to change people’s lives. Stories can resonate in you like nothing else. Recently, my friend and I watched Barbie in The Princess and the Pauper. That movie first came out when I was seven, and I absolutely loved it.  So, when my friend and I watched it again, all those happy feelings came back. I hadn’t seen this movie in years, but all those powerful emotions from the story were still there.(Just a little side note, Princess and the Pauper is an awesome story. Way better romance than Twilight!) I promise there was a reason for me going off on a tangent (I never understood that phrase…) about stories. You’ll probably hear me talk a lot about stories. I am a writer after all. But I believe that stories have really shaped who we are as a society. People love stories. There’s a reason why Hollywood makes so much money. We love stories because they’re a reflection of things we go through or feelings that we can never find a good way to express.

Your life is a powerful story. You might think it’s a boring story. Or a hopeless one. Or a pointless story. I guarantee you’re wrong. In every story, there is the hopeless moment. Usually, there’s more than one hopeless moment. But the main character hangs on, because they see something worth it. If you’re reading this, then that means that you’re alive. If you put your hand over your heart, you would feel it beating. That beating is called purpose. Guess what, you have a 100% success rate of getting through bad days. There’s a reason you've hung on. There’s a reason you've kept going.

When you want to stop, when you want to quit, when you want to just give up and let go, remember the reason why you've kept at it for so long. Is it because you have a friend who’s looking up to you? Maybe you have a sibling who needs you. Maybe you just need to prove to yourself that you can keep going. In the darkness, it’s so easy to lose sight of the thing that kept you going. It’s in the darkness that you need to cling most to what you knew in the light.

The Princess and the Pauper isn't my favorite story. My favorite story is actually about a man who saw you and me in our hopelessness and decided that we were worth dying for. He put hope in the end of our story. I don’t know how much you know about Jesus. Maybe you don’t really believe in God. If you don’t, I’m not here to cram religion down your throat. I just want to let you know my reason for keeping on. This is the reason I keep going when I've just spent half the night crying myself to sleep— the reason I choose not to let the darkness envelop me. My Jesus saw me and decided that I was worth it. He decided that He would be broken. He would die a heinous death for me.

He believed that I was worth it. He believed that I had a purpose that could far exceed my brokenness. That is my reason for continuing.

Honestly, the last few months have been crazy. There have been really good things, like making a lot of awesome new friends and making some other friendships stronger. Then there have been some really not good things. Like having my mouth wired shut—and puking through that. Yeah, if you stick with me for the next couple weeks, you’ll probably get to hear about that (or I just lost half of you guys who would rather not hear about that…). A lot of the things that have happened have made me want to just stop, but life keeps going. I have to choose to keep going along with it.

When you want everything to just stop, what's your reason to keep going?