Breathing Room: When My Lungs and My Faith Gave Out

My world has a habit of shrinking down to the size of a single, ragged breath. It can start with something as innocent as a cup of tea, a little too strong, that awakens a familiar ghost in my lungs. The wheezing begins, a soundtrack to a life spent dodging invisible threats—the icy air of a train station, the sterile chill of a lecture hall. Each gasp is a memory, and for years, each pill of a doctor-prescribed steroid was a small surrender in a war I was fighting alone.

This self-reliance was a skill forged in desperation. Before I even knew an inhaler could be a lifeline, I endured each suffocating attack in silence. They were ambushes, coming closer and closer together, until I grew tired of living with the constant threat of my own breath expiring. I was a child soldier in this war, paying for my own antibiotics because a profit-driven healthcare system told me to just "come back" if they didn't work, never once mentioning basic nutrition. At home, my uneducated parents, saturated by media and lacking nutritional knowledge, could offer no help; we were a family trapped in a bitter cycle of sickness. I once collapsed on a street, my body finally giving out. As I dropped to the ground to regulate my airways, my school friend managed help me walk to nearest cafe so i can breathe and drink hot water, just enough to get me to a clinic where I begged a doctor for help. My rattling plea for air convinced him to give me a 1ml injection of pure distilled liquid Diprospan—a powerful steroid for severe conditions—just so I could walk out into the cold air again. No one at home would ever know. We were just strangers co-living under one roof, paying our own medical bills since middle school. It took an airline job with company insurance specialist benefits for me to discover the inhaler, a device that could finally call a truce in the war inside my chest.

With every battle won by my own grit, the fortress around my heart grew higher. When the God I believed in felt distant, the cold, powdery taste of an inhaler was a more immediate savior. My silent health crises became the mortar for my walls of self-reliance. No one, not even in the house of God, could show me what real hope looked like. So I learned to save myself. The cruelty I saw in the world—and shockingly, in the church—only added more bricks to that wall. Church leaders twice my age used fear to boost their attendance, whispering blatant lies I believed: that if I stayed home, the devil would have more room to attack, as if their watchful eyes were my only salvation. God became a silent listener to whom I vented to, not a savior I trusted. Miracles were for other people. My wilderness had begun.

That wilderness became a frozen hell during a probationary flight. A severe bronchitis attack had stolen my breath, but the duties were unforgiving. My grading supervisor, a man I’d never even worked with, began his tirade. He saw my sickness, my inexperience, and still berated me for being slow. I wheezed, coughed, and teared up as he relentlessly demanded apologies, trapped in my seat by the airline's unwritten cultural rules. I had to interrupt just to beg for a cup of hot water. Later, when the attack forced me to my knees in the aisle, he simply watched, seated comfortably. "Settle yourself and come back when you're done," he said coldly, "because I am not finished talking." He gestured toward a galley in the first-class cabin—a section I wasn't even trained for—indifferent to whether I crawled there or died on the spot. That was the merciless airline culture back then. The people we were meant to serve had no compassion, and I wondered if God was still in charge of a world so devoid of justice.

The feeling of being cursed was relentless. It was in my grandmother’s long drawn-out battle with cancer i witnessed for years when i was still in middle school, where she endured rounds of chemotherapy and radiotherapy that filled oncologists' pockets but only seemed to prolong her agony, all while my grandfather stood by, cursing her for being "dumb" enough to get sick. I watched her become almost boneless from the aftereffects, a frail ghost of the woman she was. I made a choice that would haunt me: I studied. I poured my grief into textbooks, believing a better future was the only tribute I could offer. The final blow came just before my O-level exams, when she finally passed on. At her funeral, my own brother branded me a hypocrite, his words a fresh wound on top of an unbearable loss. And when my results came back, impossibly improved, the congratulations I expected were replaced by the jealous curses of my peers. Every night after, the shower became my sanctuary for a grief so extreme I thought it was normal. For hours, I would cry in silence, until grief wasn't just an emotion anymore—it was a permanent, irremovable part of my life. That nightly ritual of grieving followed me into adulthood, a tradition I couldn't escape. No matter how much I cried, the grief stayed unprocessed, a heavy cloak I couldn't take off. As life’s tragedies multiplied, the grief only deepened, and I often found myself wondering when God would finally have mercy and take me off the Earth, just to alleviate the pain in my heart. It was in my own home, a place splintered by the unexplainable anger issues of my family. It was in my father’s daily screams, which he justified with the chillingly honest, "because I can't control myself." In my shame, I punished my own body, forgetting what hunger felt like until crippling gastric pain left me too dizzy to stand. It was in the hollow regret of my dad, who admitted he forced my mother to stay in her low-paying menial job to pay for debts from scams his own greed created. And it was in the surreal horror of watching my mother lie unresponsive for months after a stroke, right before my final university exams. My sky didn't just fall; it shattered. The world turned black, and my heart hardened with it. All the mourning, the midnight hours spent begging God, reading through the book of Job until the pages blurred—none of it moved His hand or His heart. I didn't know how to stop crying anymore. I didn't know how to sleep.

Life felt rigged, like a Monopoly game where someone else owned all the property. So I strove harder, while I still could. Haunted by the painful curses and sicknesses my family had struggled with, and terrified of being left behind by society, I became a time-efficient workaholic in the most extreme sense. I didn't just work jobs I hated; I filled every waking moment with them. My schedule was a fortress of multiple jobs designed to leave no room for my mind to relax. Any spare minute was immediately filled with studying, a frantic attempt to improve my marketable skills. This relentless drive wasn't just ambition; it was an escape. To the outside world, it looked like an effortless achiever. Peers, jealous of my results, threw obscene, blasphemous curses my way, wondering how someone seemingly lazy could score better than them. They scorned me for my aloof attitude towards relationships in life, never knowing it was my way to cope with my unending grief. What they never saw were the long, hidden hours—the study and work fueled by a frantic mindset that was causing my body to break without sleep, little by little. They couldn't witness the childhood horrors that played on a loop in my mind, the real reason for my relentless, isolating drive to win. I sweated blood and tears, forgetting to eat and sleep just to meet deadlines for colleagues I was serving to help them hit their personal bonus goals in a messed-up toxic corporate reward ranking system. My kindness, my lunch breaks, my annual leave, my health—all were sacrificed for the vanities of others. I turned a blind eye and often endured countless betrayals from evil people silently forgiving them and leave—even cunningly smart, vicious close friends who once took advantage of my naivety for their own ulterior gains, targeting whatever I had until I no longer saw the good in humankind. Finally, I broke. Completely. In that silent, shattering moment, one thought cut through the noise: Something is fundamentally wrong. My self-reliance hadn't saved me. It had only guaranteed the crash.

That thought led me to a pastor I had known and feared for a decade. I reached out from familiarity, hoping for solace. Instead, the self-proclaimed experienced man offered a new kind of prison. He did all kinds of things to isolate me from anyone he knew, just so he could have full control over my life. He wove a web of false guarantees to trap me under his watch. He knew my deepest fears and used them like a surgeon's scalpel, torturing me with lies while privately asking for illegal favors. He told me God wasn't in any of my blessings, that I had to abandon everything to serve his church for three years. Then came the final, sickening realization. When I challenged him to pray the exact curses he’d pronounced on me, he couldn't. I saw the evil then, but I was so broken I stayed, trapped in denial. Because of his influence, I began to fear humanity so much that I prayed for death, crushed by the weight of trusting him so wrongly more than once at my lowest point. I found it increasingly hard to even step out of the house, terrified of the unrecognizable evil that could hide even within the very church walls that proclaimed Jesus’ mighty works. Yet, my own inaction and a fear of missing out compelled me to move beyond the terror, forcing myself to go to prayer meetings even when I knew no one there. It was a trying, lonely battle, and I kept questioning how long God wanted to wait to test me to my breaking point. It was only when the weight of all I had lost—my career, my friends, my health, my hobbies, my peace, my faith, my heart, my very identity—became unbearable that I could see his impact for what it was: deep, profound trauma. I finally ran, and his desperate spam calls, disguised as loyalty, sent a chill down my spine. I hadn't lost everything because I was brave; I had lost it because a man of God told me I would die by God's own hand if I didn't submit to his nonsensical demands.

His ultimate tyranny was the claim that my world was falling apart because of my past, because I didn't know God's laws—all this from a man who refused to know or listen to me. Believing the lies he spoke, a desperate fear took hold. I had to know what rules I was trespassing. So, in aug-2024, I opened the Bible, not for comfort, but with the frantic need to find out what I was doing so wrong. And in a couple of months, I read the whole thing. My journey through the wilderness wasn't over, but I was finally looking for a way out myself.