“You’re finally going to be happy in heaven. No more pain. It’s okay to be scared and it’s normal. I mean, you’re about to die.”

These words were some of the last heard by Conrad Roy III, an 18 year-old who committed suicide using a gas-powered water pump in 2014.

Who would say something like that?

His girlfriend.

The 18-year-old Michelle Carter exchanged hundreds of text messages with Roy the day of his death. And while some of the messages claimed Carter’s love for Roy, many of them bore much darker themes.

According to the Washington Post, Carter incessantly asked him when he was going to commit suicide. She even researched how he could carry out the act painlessly.

Telling Conrad that “he would be her guardian angel in heaven” and that “there isn’t anything anyone can do to save you, not even yourself”, Carter could possibly be facing manslaughter charges in Massachusetts.

Although, she happily told her friend the day before Conrad died that their last words were “I love you”, she told the same friend months later that she could have stopped the suicide.

How? She admitted to being on the phone with Carter while he was committing his suicide. Roy got out of the truck when carbon monoxide gas started to emit into the cab. He told Carter it was working, but she told him to get back in.

After Roy’s death, Carter started a fundraising tournament in Conrad’s remembrance, along with proclaiming herself as a supporter of mental health. She even posted on social media and told stories about how she tried to save her boyfriend’s life.

I believe that Michelle Carter is a sociopathic bully who has no feelings for the stranded, depressed, and lonely individuals in this world. She is also a pathological liar for stating how she tried to save Conrad’s life. Yes, Conrad did have a failed attempt at suicide in his younger years, but instead of helping him face his problems, she pushed him towards those problems head-on.

I also believe that Michelle’s friend is at fault, and that she is crazy as well. Upon hearing Michelle talk about how she was helping her boyfriend plan a painless suicide, her friend should have gone to the police.

Was she undisturbed by hearing the plans or was she too scared to say something? No matter what the situation was, thanks to her, a family will never see their son again, and that to me is one of the most disturbing parts of this story.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2013, the U.S. reported 41,149 suicides (that is a suicide every 12.8 minutes). Although the CDC reported in 2013 that the highest suicide-rate happened to people from 45 to 64 years old, it seems to me personally that teenagers and young adults are the most vulnerable. Why?

I do not know about the rest of the student body, but I have felt at times lost and stranded in my teen and young-adult years. Have I experienced depression, and do I know how dark and deep of a hole it is? No. I do know what fear feels like, though.

It is bad thoughts and people like Michelle Carter that can ruin the mental state and emotional health of a person, make them doubt themselves. How do we overcome these voices, both internal and external?

Even at our hardest times, our mind must overcome and we must tell ourselves that we are on this earth for a purpose, no matter what others say.

Religion can be spoken about freely, yet we tread softly when publically mentioning it.

But, the hardest idea to grasp is that having the right to spread religious awareness is certainly not the same as pushing beliefs on others.

While people reserve the right to practice religious freedom and to speak without restraint about any faith they choose, forcing others to listen isn’t freedom of speech; it’s harassment.

There are over 127 major religions and seven billion people on earth with seven billion different views of God. Some love Him, some fear Him, some question His existence and some are still searching for Him.

Some will decide that God plays no role in the trials and tribulations of life, while others will find faith the moment they see their newborn child take the first breath of being.

Whether we discover where we spiritually belong in a pew on Sunday morning or on a lonely drive with no destination, the journey to finding or forgetting God is what determines our views. We can’t be told what and who to believe in, or to even believe in anything at all.

What we learn, who we meet and the challenges we face are what we remember when we stand before Him, not the church members that knock on our front doors, or the people that stand in the quad condemning us all to hell.

And if the church goer at your front door changes your perspective, let them. Be baptized in one church, change your mind, and be baptized in another. Let what you learned in biology class make you question evolution and the powers above.

Learning from life experiences and questioning God’s ways isn’t sin; it’s human. It’s human to change emotionally, mentally, and spiritually when physical surroundings change. It’s human to simply be curious and indecisive.

Faith only exists because there are people that believe strongly enough in it to make it a reality and a way of life. Without doubters and differences, the strength of religion would never have anything to be measured against.

Because of that, religion without true belief is weak.

Never practice out of habit, don’t follow just because your parents or friends do, and don’t ever think one religion is superior to another. In a time that seems to have the explanation for everything in a test tube or on a database, people believing in any God at all is a miracle in itself.