For most, the start of December is one of the brightest times of the year. Holiday cheer is in full swing, Christmas is only a few weeks away, we're all still full from hearty Thanksgiving meals and joy radiates from pretty much everything—even our Starbucks cups. But for me, December has become one of the most difficult times of the year, and since starting to write for The Odyssey Online this past summer, I've always known that this is the one article that I'd eventually have to face. The realization that December isn't really December anymore.

A year ago I lived in a house with five other girls, one of which was my best friend of ten years. On December 8, I returned to the townhouse for a "roommate meeting," where we sat down at the table, the closest of friends, and left confused and as distant strangers. I had never been afraid of or concerned about roommate problems because I never expected to have any. We were happy, we got along and we lived problem-free for well over a year, so to sit down for a meeting and have everything fall apart was a surreal experience.

Long story short, as minor roommate debates and the constant stress of college combined, things had grown rocky in the house, but in the end we were just a bunch of people who got caught up in a giant misunderstanding. We're all good human beings, but we just weren't meant to live together, and perhaps, we weren't meant to be friends. Regardless, I was deeply hurt by the experience, which left me feeling worthless and unsafe in my own home. There were days when I'd cry in class, unprovoked and unstoppable. I had anxiety attacks where I could hardly breathe and had to stop whatever I was doing in favor of wrapping myself in a blanket and waiting for it to pass. I doubted every second of every day for over a month that I was a good person, and I wondered if anyone could ever truly care about me, especially after I was told by those I trusted most that I was a terrible person. I worried all day about going home at night and worried all night about how I was going to get out of the house the next morning without facing them. Ultimately, the anxiety got so bad that I commuted for the remainder of the semester, spending only a handful of final nights in the house I once called a home.

My best friend and I moved out at the end of January.

It's easy for me to admit that this is one of the hardest things I've ever had to write, because even a year later, now surrounded by people who walked in on the worst chapter of my life and stayed, the scars linger. Every so often I'll have a bad day where I doubt everything. I still get anxiety attacks, although I'm slowly getting better at controlling them. I'll take the long way to class to avoid my former roommates, and I've spent more time than I can count working toward forgiveness. A year ago I was deeply hurt, and not a day goes by that I don't think of the situation at least once, but a professor said something recently that stuck with me, "You can only ever start from where you are."

The situation I was in last fall was, without a doubt, absolutely toxic. I was trapped, I was unhappy and I wasn't myself, but I learned so much about life. I learned that it's OK to be hurt. If someone says something that hurts you, even if they "didn't intend it that way," it's still hurtful, and no one can decide otherwise. I learned that your real friends, the ones that really care about you, will love you no matter what. The people I thought were my friends didn't actually care about me, they only cared about the person they wanted me to be. Somewhere along the line, however, those who did care started to help me pick up the pieces, and they haven't left since. I learned that sometimes life doesn't go the way we planned, and sometimes it hurts more than any root canal or broken bone, but it can also lead us to new people and experiences that are so worth the pain. Lastly, I've learned that I'm so much stronger than I thought, because after 12 months of debating and suffering and wondering what it was that I did wrong, I've started to move on from where I was last year.

And you know what? December is starting to feel like December again.