My name is Sarah. I always felt like losing, like my life was a losing battle. When I am looking at my past, I see rocks. A heavily rocked road that seemed to never end. Whether it was sunlight, whether it was dark, there was a stoned path underneath my feet.

Travelling this path through my entire life I noticed insightful things. I gained this knowledge only some time ago. Dark times and black rocks at the bottom were all I knew back then.

What was this road that I travelled? It was my life, full of unachieved opportunities. Once I knew I lost my chance, but then I accepted the fact that I am defeated. It was a blind gap in my life that I used to recall many times. How can someone be grateful for the life he has been given when all he sees is rock bottom and himself underneath?

I used to use this metaphor often to describe my state back then. All I could think of was my past, my mistakes, my decisions and my lost chances. What used to be my life is not my life anymore.

I embraced what I had without throwing myself into the stone bottom. I appreciate every moment of my past. It was another path of my life — the path to recovery. It wasn't stoned but covered in roses. The Roses were so beautiful that I wanted to smell each of them. So fresh and delicate looking. As delicate as me when I travelled that path.

When you are in the recovery state you tend to go through many things that you are incapable of changing. If you accept this truth, you can easily travel further. I reached my destination; my life goal was completed. I always knew there was a goal that needed to be achieved.

Even from early childhood, I knew there was something at the end. I say the end because I refer to the state when you feel the most peaceful. The state when you know you are complete is when you reach the end of your path.

There are many paths as well as there are many people. I refer to those paths as veins. Countless veins are travelling through my body, transporting blood that is needed for me to live. The same is with the paths. They are needed as much as veins; they are a part of me.

To keep the blood flowing you need to keep moving on your path. I have known that truth for a long time. I remember when one of my close relatives, the person dearest to me, told me about the paths of life.

I was ten when I started my walk down the sand walk. The sand was warm, a little too warm for my vulnerable and soft feet. The sun was shining bright till I was twelve. Travelling till the age of twelve was my happy time. The sand was getting warmer and warmer with each moment of sadness. It was like a paradox. However, when I was little, I didn't refer to it that way. The paths of life are only in my head, I am only visualizing them to feel stable.

My childhood was a ride full of happiness and regret. I suffered living in a family of ignorant, they didn't value my feelings as much as I never learned to value the feelings of others. I wasn't taught empathy, only judgement. Harsh judgement was all I gave and all I got.

When I was ten, I felt alone. My father was drinking alongside my mother crying over it. I didn't know what I did wrong. "You are a mistake" my father used to call me every time he got drunk. My mother covered my ears so that I wouldn't hear his truth.

The sand kept on getting warmer, my steps became cautious and hurtful. My life then was like the path I travelled. It seemed endless, just like all the terrifyingly depressive times in my life. I wanted to see the end, the end of my misery.

I didn't know I needed help because they told me not to show how I feel. Likewise, I have never felt my emotions being valid. I marked them as invaluable.

The path full of sand ended when I was twelve. There came the muddy walk. My first attempts to fit into society. New school, new classmates but the same home environment. What I thought I achieved at school was peace, when I came home what I saw was chaos. Glass was thrown over the wall, tables turned, and chairs were crushed on the floor — this is all I think of when I recall my household.

Keeping in with the school environment taught me lessons. The muddy walk was tricky, just like living beside new people. Sporadically, I dropped, sometimes I went up the muddy path. Times of extreme happiness and times of extreme sadness. What I learned there is that there is someone called a psychologist.

I have never known someone like a psychologist. When I discovered what he does I was shocked. How can someone value the other person's feelings without laughing them off?

My first visit was when I was fourteen. A bit too late and enough time for multiple physical scars to appear on my body. I remember the first question he asked me after I told him briefly about my life.

Did he ask me: How to appreciate yourself?

I recall my expression from time to time. It was an attempt to help me stand up from my past, and my dysfunctional family.

I didn't know the answer, however, his question kept me on my toes for many nights. My doodles book was how I showed my feelings. When I was first asked that question, I drew a wolf. I labelled it with adjectives in the way I perceived wolf. I have never thought of any animal wrongly. They were different from humans — pure.

"Strong, independent, loyal" was all I got then when labelling an animal. I was given a task to label myself like that, so I left the paper blank. Strong adjectives about me were what I never thought of. Me as a strong, independent being? There is no chance of that happening.

Many years and as many psychologists trying to help me with my state. No one ever did it. The muddy walk ended when I was sixteen.

The stony rock path started. Those were cold stones beneath my feet, but they were steady. At that time, I considered myself stable emotionally but never truly happy. I didn't achieve a state of comfort, peace, or gratefulness for the surrounding things. A flying butterfly didn't make me happy. A sun shining up the horizon didn't wash all my problems away.

Here came the path of mistakes, chances and regrets. As I was not happy with myself, overanalyzing every situation in my current life and cutting my past off entirely, I never really noticed the present. And the present was joyful, but apparently, I wasn't given that joy. Every party invitation I declined, every date I passed and every smile I waved off were my regrets.

I never found a goal in my life until I was eighteen. This was when I returned to my doodle book and the question, I was asked by my first psychologist. It lingered in my mind repeatedly as I observed my little sketches. Every painting I labelled by one word. One word that made me happy during the day I drew it. That's how the recovery path started. I gathered my sad diaries that came from my heart with the doodle notebooks at the side, and I went to group therapy.

I searched that group online as it was labelled as "Self-love" I thought of it as a perfect occasion to show others what I have learned. By coming to this therapy, I put one seed in the ground for something called: Recovery.

The therapy was another experience. People there were just like me, having blank expressions coupled with a lack of words. I was the one to speak this time. And they listened, they did.

I remember that day like it was yesterday. Walking into this room, full of unrecognized feelings. Feeling of hope. A hope that I can make them see what I see. Firstly, I showed them my doodles with their names. I saw some teenagers shrug their shoulders at them, saw some roll their eyes. But then I saw one person that had glittering eyes when I was showing them. I did it for that person as much as I did it for myself.

I didn't know it yet, but I started the recovery path back then. Not only that, but I found the goal I was looking for, being a help to others. I knew that I would be able to help others the way I helped myself. The only thing for me to do was to speak.

I explained my story, in more detail this time. I told them about the paths of life. Telling them that everyone has a path to walk through was like a gold lesson I learned living through my life.

Thereafter, I kept on searching for more group therapies in the same theme. I mastered my speech to perfection, and I received many words of affirmation about what I gifted those people. Every smile I returned because it was real. My smile was real now, and I felt it.

When I wasn't speaking, I was writing. Writing about my story. It wasn't like in those diaries filled with sadness, it was different. My life gave me lessons and those lessons I filled on the blank pages. I labelled my first book as the name of the first group of therapy I went to.

A beautiful milestone it was, one of the few I recall with a smile. I have never meant for my life to go this way as much as I didn't know it will go this way. This is for the sake of the paths of life. They are unpredictable. Things in life are not fixed, they are constantly changing. As much as we appreciate the change and learn from it, we can begin to love ourselves.

It took me many years to fulfil my life path, but this time will come for each one of us.

My name is Sarah, and I am now a motivational speaker. Grateful for all the paths I travelled through, all the mistakes I learned from and all those missed chances needed for my development.