Brokenhearted Girl

Hi My Sweet Friends,

Earlier this week, I informed you that this post was going to be very transparent and raw. So, before I begin, I would like to address a few different things.

1.  The blog post you are about to read is about my PAST.  It is NOT a representation of who I am today, but it is a part of my story and who I am today. 

2.  Many of you reading this will be blessed and allow my story to change your heart. However, I know that there will also be some backlash from this post and I am prepared for that.

3.  If you are NOT  prepared for a VERY candid message, please stop reading after this sentence.

4.  For obvious reasons, I will NOT be naming any men mentioned in this blog. I would like to respect their privacy and I am asking you to do the same. Please DO NOT make assumptions because they are more than likely wrong.

Alright, let's go ahead and face our demons head on.


Last week I wrote a blog titled, "The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me". In that blog, I shared my story of heartbreak with you. Today's story will recount of the aftermath of that heartbreak. It will convey what happens when you don't allow God to come in and properly heal your heart. It will allow you to mentally deduce what happens when you try to heal yourself, by filling the void in your heart with the wrong things.

So let's go back to the night my ex broke up with me. Now in my previous blog I mentioned that he broke up with me in his house. What I didn't mention is that I never left that night. I thought spending a night would change things. I was wrong. I spent the entire night crying myself to sleep in HIS bed.

Stupid, I know.

The next morning I woke up, packed up the few things I had there, and left to my house. I was so devastated, empty, and depressed, that I didn't even bother going to work. I knew I wouldn't make it through the day because at that point in time, I was barely making it through life.

So I get home and the whole day I just cry, sleep, wake up, realize how alone I was, and then cry and sleep again. Finally,  I woke up around 7pm and took a look through my Facebook posts. I saw that a girl I recently met had posted a message about being home alone with nothing to do. So I inboxed her and asked her if she wanted to go to a party at a local bar with me. She said yes, and I picked her up.

We go to this local party and end up chugging drink, after drink, after drink. At the time I just wanted to drink my misery away, and it just felt like there wasn't enough liquor at that bar to numb my pain, so I started chugging shots like they were water.

At that point, I had a good buzz going and my heart still felt shattered, but at least I couldn't feel the emptiness. I was surrounded by music, people and my new friend. For a moment, I forgot about how in a matter of 24 hours, my entire life had changed.

Then across the room I see an old friend. He comes over to chat and we get to talking. I eventually spill my little heart out to him about my breakup. He listens and then eventually starts becoming more flirtatious. I take the bait and flirt back. Now all of this is happening, and although I was drunk, I was still well aware of the commitment he was already in with another woman. Yet, my broken heart didn't care because anything, even this committed man, would help soothe the pain.

Eventually the night ends, he takes my friend and I home because we had too much to drink. He walks me to my door and kisses me. It could have all ended there but I decided to return the kiss. Again, not thinking about his commitment, or the fact that I just had my heart crushed the night before. I was just a broken girl looking for someone to kiss my pain away, so I let him.

That one night turned into many more nights. The many more nights we spent together, we became more attached and then we eventually slept together. We did this for months. I was well aware of the fact that he lived one life during the day, as did I, and then we lived another life together at night. I kept his secret and he kept mine, and then we kept secrets from each other.

Although I spent many nights with this one man, I still spent several other days and nights with my ex.  I just took my heart, body and time and played it like a ping pong ball between two men who didn't love me or respect me.

In the midst of dealing with the pain from my breakup, I started to to develop feelings for this new man. A man who had no hopes to commit to me or have any type of future with me. A man who saw my vulnerability and used it to his advantage. Somehow, lost in the world of my own heartbreak,  I became the exact thing that I said I would never become; a home wrecker.

It didn't just stop there. Everything about me changed. I was this new person, so careless with the things I did. I became a liar. I started to lie so much. I lied to my sister, to my best friend, to my parents, my ex, to this man and most importantly I lied to myself.

I started to have this really poisoned mentality. I convinced myself that I was just "playing my ex the way he played me" and "I was just doing me".  I was living a life of deception because deception was easier to live and deal with, than the truth of what I had allowed my life to become. I didnt have the strength or guts to turn around and look at the mess I had created. I didn't want to turn around and look at all the garbage that had ripped through the garbage bag of my life. I just wanted to keep living this lie and double life until it caught up to me. So, I just took my heartache and kept placing it in the wrong things. I took my pain and I chose to place it in my bed, in men, in liquor and in lies.

I had thought that I was playing my ex by sleeping with another man. I was determined to show him who was in charge, that I wasn't phased by him, that he didn't hurt me, and that I could move on without him. I quickly found that the ONLY person who was being played was myself. I was willing to put my body, respect, morals, happiness, wholeness and heart at risk to prove to some guy that I won! In the process of trying to win, I lost it all.

In all of my life, in all of the things I had experienced, this was my rock bottom. It didn't end there. There were many other things that took place after but I will save that for another day.

It took me almost 2 whole years to look back at my life, grab my pain and drag it to God. He came in like a wrecking ball and just started cutting out all the poisonous people and things I had allowed in my life. I Started to lose friends, exes, men, and all types of things.

I was literally so committed to just allowing God to pull me together and fix me that I stood home all the time. I still stay home a ton because I don't need to go out there and continue to place my life into the wrong things. My life is precious. I am responsible for the things I allow to come in and out of my life and I have learned to protect it. I'm not the vulnerable girl I used to be, but it took me a really long time to get here.

When I consider who I was a few years ago, I see that the pain and hurt didn't just come from my ex. It came from all kinds of things that I never allowed God to deal with. My ex leaving me was just the last drop of water that made the bucket tip over. The pain he caused me was familiar to my heart and it's defense mechanism was to guard itself. I had taken the pain that my father caused me, my stepmother caused me, my mother caused me and my previous ex caused me and I allowed it to build up until I become reckless with my life and my decisions. I enabled others to hurt me, use me, and taken advantage of me. I became OK with hurting myself and being vulnerable to hurt.

I'm not proud of who I use to be. I was hateful, unforgiving, malicious, deceitful, a home wrecker, messy, and insecure in who I was.

I was filthy.

I share this story with you in hopes of you realizing that you too can overcome your sins and faults, even the worst of them. The only thing you CANNOT do is change your own heart. That's impossible for you to do. You don't have the power to take years of pain, sin, filth and destruction and transform it into goodness. You do not have that power and neither did I.

It wasn't an easy road for me. I had to fight my way through this.

My whole life I had battled with feeling alone. I always felt alone as a child and that feeling just overtook my life and became natural for me as an adult. When I was a little girl, my mother wasn't always an active part of my life.  Because of this, I felt as though I wasn't enough. I felt if I had been enough, she would have fought harder to remain in my life. I felt as though her love for me wasn't enough to want to stay. Then, as an adolescent I battled with a stepmother who didn't accept me for a very long time. She had married a man she loved, but she had an extremely hard time adjusting to accepting his children. She treated me unfairly and often did things to hurt me emotionally. Again, I felt alone and as if I just wasn't enough to love. Then, I battled with my father,  who often was stuck between choosing his wife or choosing his daughters. He often chose to protect his wife, and overlook the things he saw. I wanted so badly for my dad just to once see the truth and see what was going on in our home but he always chose to ignore it. Again, I felt alone and as though I was wasn't enough to protect and love. Eventually things became so bad at home that my father kicked me out of his house.

I thought my life would be better once I left my dad's house, but that's when my life exploded. So at this point I clung to the only thing I had left and that was my high school sweetheart. Again, I was disappointed. I found out he not only cheated on me, but he cheated while I was at work, he cheated before I came to his house, he cheated after I left his house and he had girls in my car. I found out that there was not just one girl he was sleeping with but there were many. He had other girls paying for stuff he gave me. He had friends covering up for him and I was so blind that I didn't see any of this. He cheated on me for 2 whole years, with the same girl and then many others and I did not even notice once. Finally, one day, he got so fed up with having to hide his cheating, he left me. So, I started hanging out with girls who did a ton of drugs, slept with tons of men, did witchcraft and had no moral compass. I didn't do a lot of what they did but I surrounded myself with these people who didn't care for me and were no good for my life. I also had no where to really live at that time. I literally, for almost 6 years, jumped from house to house. I partied every single weekend and was always high or drunk and just crashed at some random friends house. It was really the only thing that helped me temporarily forget how alone I felt.

During that time in my life, I could be in a room full of people and inside my heart I felt as though I had no place to call home, no one who cared for me and no one who loved me. No matter how many people said it or showed it, somehow, the devil had convinced me that I was not worthy enough of fighting for, I was not worthy enough to love and I was not worthy enough to have a home I could call my own.

All of the stuff you just read, led me to make bad choices with men and in life. I never confronted issues I had and I NEVER had the strength to leave things that were toxic to my life, and for the life of me, I could not forgive those who had hurt me.

That stuff happened for years and years and years. Until.....

I found Jesus.

He's loved me in ways my parents failed to love me. He's loved me in ways men have failed to love me. He's loved me in ways I have failed to love me. He's completely changed my life. There had been days that His love alone was the reason I woke up, and even the reason I ended up not taking my own life. His love alone was the reason I would wake up and do something with myself, even when I felt like there was no purpose to my life. I don't know who I would be if He never came into my life to rescue me. I don't even know if I would be sitting here writing this blog to you. That's how low my life was, that how hopeless I had become.

Today I am FREE! I am so, so, so FREE! I rejoice in that. I'm so different than who I used to be. I'm content in my singleness, in being alone, in being set apart from other people. I am content in who I am. I am content in my purpose for life. I am content! The things he has taken out of my life, He has replaced with greater and bigger things and for that I am deeply grateful.

The spirit of loneliness that used to haunt my life and hold me prisoner, hardly ever comes knocking at more door anymore. He already knows that I will not answer. He already knows that he has lost control of my life. He used to come banging at my door, trying to kick it down, to destroy my life again, but I would sit there crying out to God, and tell loneliness to go away and that he wasn't welcomed anymore. Eventually after all the pounding and banging, the spirit of loneliness left my life because I never opened when he came around.

Today, as I sit here and blog, I am content, whole, happy, I've forgiven my past and the people who hurt me, and my mindset is SOOOOO different.

I will be the first to admit that I have made SOOOO many mistakes and I had often gone back to my old lifestyle, but I have NEVER gone back and remained comfortable living that way. The reason for that is because God hasn't allowed anything to separate us, even when I have. At the club, in the bar, even while having sex with some undeserving man, the sweetest, most gentle, most loving voice always whispers, "Daughter, I am for YOU. I love you. These things you allow in your life won't give you the satisfaction, love and peace that I have to offer you. Daughter, come back to me." and I did.

I share this blog, my life, my past and my mistakes with you ladies to inspire you.  I was broken once and I fought like crazy to become who I am today, to break free of those things that held me captive. I want you to know that if someone so broken and ugly as I was can be transformed, then you can too.

Initially this blog was written to encourage young women not to sleep around and give their bodies away so freely. I hope you got that message, but I also pray that you understand that you can overcome ANYTHING.

I see you ladies posting statuses about your unfaithful husbands/boyfriends, your deadbeat baby daddies, your backstabbing friends and your struggles. This breaks my heart.

So I wanted to share my story with you in hopes that you would find encouragement, keeping pressing into God's promises, keep your eyes focused on Christ and fight like crazy to win your life back.

You can do it. You're an overcomer, Darling.

Stop placing your hope in sex, money, men, drugs, drunkenness and things that serve you no good. Pour your life and time into Jesus, because He is the only One who will ALWAYS be FOR you. He won't temporarily just numb your pain, but He will take it away and make you whole! He is the only one who can take the shattered pieces of your heart and perfectly place them back together again.

Rest in that promise, Darlings. He is for YOU!

Before I left you go, I would like to ask that you share this with as many women as possible. 

Jessica Torres

Founder of Beauty of Encouragement