Have you ever gotten your butt kicked and it was so bad you didn't even know what happened? 

That was me in the year 2022. 

I don’t know if you read about the experience with the edible, or if any of you have had an experience like that, but post edible me was someone I did not know. The life that I had known had ended and I was now dying. 

I was getting my butt kicked by a bully named Anxiety. 

He would beat on me every moment of every day.

Before the incident, I used to avoid sleep, but now I was chasing after it and it was nowhere to be found. 7 days passed and I was still awake. It escalated so much that during the episodes I lost the ability to even speak or walk. I thought I was going to lose my mind. 

I felt so trapped and so scared. I found my heart racing, breathing quenched, body shaking, throat dry, chest hurting, and this dreadful inevitable doom I was sure was waiting for me. I tried to avoid the things that exacerbated the already painstaking feelings I was experiencing.

That was when I realized that the Tamika I’d always known had truly died. After I woke up in the hospital, I had awoken as a completely different person. 

The only thing that didn’t give me anxiety was praying. And so I learned to rely on God. He was the only way I could exist, that I could stand to be alive because there were many days that I wondered if it was even worth it for me to have woken up that July night. 

But I knew that I couldn’t give up. I’d already put my family through so much, I had to stay strong and I had to keep pushing. 

And so I continued to pray. I would go to God and tell him how I felt and in those moments where I would be sobbing, shaking, snotty before him and begging him with wordless pleas he would meet me.