Because I’ve been practicing gratitude every day for years at this point, my mental health has significantly improved, and I no longer see God as a sadistic freak who likes to torture kids for fun. 

At the same time, I still struggle with envy and resentment towards God and others. I still have a desire to be “normal”, and still have some lingering anger over the fact that I’m not and never will be “normal”. I still struggle immensely to fit into society and connect with my peers and community. I still feel tremendously out-of-place in the world, and that feeling is exacerbated when I step onto any college campus. After all, I act more like a 90-year-old than a 23-year-old; I make better friends with my professors than my peers. Hell, when I attended the summer college Bible study, I made stronger friendships with the hosts (who were in their late 50s/early 60s) than with the peers I tried to connect with. 

While there’s nothing wrong with having much older friends as a young adult, I still don’t like how hard it is for me to connect with my peers. I don’t like how out-of-place I feel as a student, or how lost and scared I feel despite the fact that I seem to have taken to college like a duck to water. And, no matter how much I write about it, or rant about it to my therapist, or try to make good friends with people my same age, or do well in my classes, the feeling of being completely out-of-place hasn’t diminished even slightly. 

To put it more specifically, I feel like I’m a character in a Final Destination movie. I was supposed to succumb to my long list of genetic diseases… but I didn’t. Now, I’m basically an old woman in a young woman’s body, trying to navigate an increasingly complicated world. I’m doing what I think is right, in the sense that I’m going to college and trying to make up for lost time, so that I can one day succeed in an increasingly-competitive job market and live independently. But, for some reason, everything just feels so… wrong. Like I shouldn’t be here. And it’s only a matter of time before I meet my Maker by getting crushed between two cement trucks on the highway. 

I know that feeling (among others) is entirely irrational. I know, logically as well as spiritually, that I’m exactly where God wants me to be. If I wasn’t meant to survive the things that I have, then I wouldn’t have survived them. 

Why then, is it so damn hard for me to relax and accept the gift I’d undeservedly been given? Why can’t I simply trust in “God’s plan” as it’s called, and fearlessly charge into the future? Why can’t I accept the objective fact that I am, in fact, an academic of sorts, and will do just fine throughout the rest of college as well as in whatever career(s) I choose? 

If I knew the answers to those questions, I wouldn’t be the stubborn, anxious creature I am.