Walking down the middle school halls at eleven years old is weird enough. New school, new kids, new teachers, everything as you know it is changing. Sixth grade for me was the first of five years I would deal with a condition known as RSD, or chronic regional pain syndrome. Of course at the time I had no idea of the road ahead and facing a condition that disables people at such a young age.

RSD is a condition that occurs when your brain is sending pain signals to a region of your body for no reason. The nerves are hyperactive and its constant pain. I was put through months of physical therapy and took medications and did acupuncture, water therapy, shock therapy and countless other forms of therapy that were suppose to help my condition. But nothing worked..

So there I was a fifteen year old three sport athlete, student, friend, sister and daughter that had her perfect life ripped out from underneath her. I spent more hours in a hospital than on a soccer field, my friends watched as their bubbly, vibrant and goofy best friend slowly have the life sucked out of her. Depression set in, if I wasnt at school I was sleeping, I didnt want to attend games or practices or go hangout with my friends because I knew I would hold them back.

I had lost sight in where I wanted to go until one day I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize the person looking back at me. I had lost the spark in my eye and drive in my heart that made me into the person that I was and I hated it.

So I stopped feeling sorry for myself and got better. I realized that I had wasted so much time believing that someone or something else was going to get me better. It hit me that the only way I was going to beat this was doing it on my own. So I stopped worrying about my condition and started living my life the way that I wanted to. Yeah there were days where I fell down and locked myself in my room but eventually i came out and faced the world again until living didn't hurt anymore. And to this day I still cherish the time I spent pushing through, I remember the time I wasted being crippled by this illness, and how I let it become my life. That I let it become the only important thing people had to know about me. Do I still have bad days? Hell yeah, who doesn't? But I've learned they're all just days, and there are plenty more where they came from so stop dwelling on the bad ones.

I was scared of life, I was scared that I would have to be in pain everyday for the rest of my life but what i neglected to realize, was that I had this amazing life in front of me. Beautiful family and friends, skills and gifts that other people in this world will never have but yet, I was so focused on the fact that I was in pain. Nothing else mattered. If I had to go through those five years of my life over again, knowing what I do now? I probably would make the same mistakes I'm not going to lie, because pain does crazy things to people but at least I would know that I'm going to be okay, in pain or not. Because I knew that underneath all that pain and suffering was the same person that there had always been, and that all this struggle was making her so much stronger.