I find it so strange how time controls everything. Time goes fast and slow, it prolongs pain, and after a while it heals the pain you are feeling slowly. Sometimes we feel we are most vulnerable and may not go on, but after a long while you move on. And you look back and think about how far you have come from that low point in your life. That is how I am feeling today. There is such a big difference between the girl who used to cut herself and felt worthless. The girl who was tricked into trusting someone, who stole her innocence. The girl who held onto that pain and let him continue to hurt her. The girl who thought she would never escape that pain or the memory of him. The same girl whose dreams were haunted of him and the fear that one day he would come back and do it all again. The girl who felt like she was broken into a million pieces and that’s all that anyone else saw.  I am no longer that girl. I don’t let my nightmares, my fears, my memory of him control me any longer. He has no power over me anymore. I have come so far. I have come so far in all of my therapy sessions talking about that pain. I no longer let the past hold me back. I have progressed in making something of myself. I have two jobs, I am happily married to a man who knows what “no” means and respects everything I say, I am pregnant with a beautiful baby boy, and I go to college and learn everything that I can. He does not define me, my hurt from the past does not define me any longer because I do not let it. I am a hard worker, a student, a wife, and now a mother. It took all of six years for me to get where I am at today. To confidently say, that I no longer think of that time. I don’t look to the past anymore, there’s nothing I can change. No one can undo what has been done. But I am so much stronger because of it, and now I look to the future with happiness and hopefulness. That’s all I wish for in this life, and to everyone I meet.