I found this Latin phrase in one of the books that I was reading recently and it stuck with me. It describes the past year of my life perfectly. Many will think it seems unrealistic that the phrase could ever mean anything to me because I'm "only nineteen", but this is untrue. I have known shadows, I have known emotional pain which many are lucky to only encounter later on in life.

I've always been a person to trust their gut instinct and stick to my guns but my ex-boyfriend taught me how to let my guard down and do things even if they didn't necessarily feel right. This was something that ultimately did me a lot of good, however destructive it became towards the end. I became an extremely trusting and loyal person who, for as long as I can remember, has been stubbornly independent, but he taught me that it was okay to depend on someone every once in a while. I love my family unconditionally of course, but I never thought that I would be able to love someone as irrevocably as I loved him. Don't get me wrong, we were far from perfect for each other. We hardly agreed on anything, like opposing ends of a magnet, and were both too proud to ever admit if we were in the wrong (I wasn't). To say he broke my heart is an understatement, let alone cringeworthy.

The last six months that we were together he put me through emotional hell. The constant lies, the reassurance, the not knowing... they were what broke me. If you don't know me personally then know that I was someone who was incredibly content with who I was, I was strong and understood my abilities and my faults and used them to my advantage. Those six months altered all of those characteristics that I prided myself on. I became blind and wholly dependent on another. I allowed myself to listen to his lies, to forgive him when he cried, to believe him when he said that he loved me, that he thought that I was beautiful, that this relationship was what he wanted. When he told me that he wanted to take a break, I let him, swearing down that I would do anything I could not to lose him, blaming myself for any doubt he had. We haven't spoken a single word to each other since, as I discovered more and more cheating it became apparent that I was never going to know everything and that I would never understand his actions regardless, understanding that accepting an apology that I was never going to get was the hardest part. It's been over a year now and the shadows are still there, though my light remains in the form of my family and the girls, and surprisingly, our new puppy (I think I transferred some of the hurt that I was feeling into loving her, which could never be a bad thing). I'm hoping that when I start uni in September more of the shadows will pass, I know it just takes time.