For some time now I have been battling with the thoughts of being a testimony. I can’t be a testimony, I kept telling myself, but here I am writing this.

I used to tell myself all my experiences were some sort of right of passage, but as I try to move through to the next phase of my life I realise they were more of a path of destruction, a load much to heavy for me to bear and memories that feel a lot like an electric chair designed to torture me.

“The past is in the past” they keep telling me, but when your past defines how you see yourself, when your past defines who people see you as, therefore how you treat yourself, when your past has dictated what your habits and patterns are, is it really in the past?

I once heard someone say that your choices become habits, and your habits become chains. I felt what they meant in the deepest possible way. We all go through something but what differentiates us is what we choose to do in those hard times.

So, if you choose to quit when things get hard because you know ‘ if it’s that hard is it worth it? After all you only live once’, when you choose to drink when it hurts, because you know, ‘ drown your sorrows’, when you choose to have sex when you feel empty because you know sexual liberation…

You wake up one day, too old for YOLO, too old for ‘oh wow I got so drunk last night’, and the walk of liberation become the walk of shame. You wonder, where did I go wrong?

And there’s only one place to start. The first choice, when you were deciding to go through the right of passage, to have a boyfriend because everyone has one, when you voluntarily got your heart broken because everyone has a first love that does that, when you choose to have a drink because everyone is trying it, and everyone has their first time to get so drunk they can’t remember how they got home, like it’s some sort of achievement…and by then it’s far too late you just have to check all the boxes, after all you have to finish what you started.

It all began when life became a bucket list of all the adventures because;

‘“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow!’

What nobody tells you is that every moment of that skid you lose parts of you, until you find yourself in some strange place with no idea who the person looking at you in the mirror is, a sense of nothingness and a deep seated hate, regret, bitterness and shame where love used to be.

For some reason I don’t think anyone going down that path will be proclaiming wow!! when they get to the finish line.

So I don’t know, maybe I might just be a testimony. For some reason beyond my human comprehension there’s someone who’s still holding their hand out to me, calling me beloved, telling me I’m a new creation in him, he’s got this blanket called Grace and it’s touch fills me with peace.

I don’t think I deserve any of this proclamation but he made me, who am I to argue with him. So I think I might just start sliding in God’s grace, holding onto Christ’s hand. And this way I can be sure to really say Wow!! when I get to the finish line.