My eldest brother, Alex, died on Valentine’s Day in 2017. I was 16, in the middle of sophomore year of high school, and he was one of the people who loved me most. I lost all my friends, switched to online classes, and stayed home with family for a year. This is just background information for this story.

It’s hard to decide to give yourself a fighting chance. This is especially true when you have seen how life can treat someone who does nothing but care for others and try to be happy. Maybe this part of grief is not so much that you want to die, too, but that you feel like you already died. A part of you died– the life you knew died with them.

You feel like you’re left in a world that makes no sense, and you don’t even make sense anymore. Most people can’t relate to this dark hole you have inside. You don’t wish it on anybody, but you wish you didn’t feel so isolated.

That’s why I wanted to stay in my house with my family. They were the only people who had this open wound with me. Life felt bleak and like it didn’t even matter what I did, I couldn’t be happy. Things would always be one traumatic moment after another.

But then, we decided to travel. We had all these plans before Alex died to see all these places. Now, we needed to do it. He died before he could, and we could die, too. I got out of the house like I never had before.

We went to 20+ states. We saw the most beautiful places this country has to offer. We cried at the endless ocean. We stared in awe of mountain formations and iconic cities. I felt the world move again.

Growing up, we had moved around a lot. We moved states 4 times, and I moved schools 8 times in 12 years. I am from southeast Kentucky, but I’m definitely not a girl who spent her whole life in the same town in the same house. But I had never been somewhere like New York or Philly. It felt like any person could come here and be anything they wanted. It’s cliché, but the solution to my dissatisfaction with life hit me like a train.

Before traveling, I had settled for the idea that I would just have to go to the local state school (which I would hate), get a random job that I hated, and keep being miserable. Seeing this other way of life and all these different types of people living it changed me. All of the sudden I saw chances for myself. This feeling was so strong that I cried.

So, senior year I turned everything around. Luckily, my only bad grades were from the semester Alex had died, so better college’s weren’t out of reach. I pursued this goal like nothing I had before. I knew I needed to come to a city and challenge myself. That’s how I ended up at Temple.