Growing Pains.

The thing about youth is that we often mistake pride for intelligence and wisdom. Just because we are able get through high school and live a decent life, we believe that we're untouchable, free of the burden that life gives us. So when life occasionally throws a stick into our well oiled gears, we fall, our minds miserable and hurt, unable to see past what we only know as our own world.

I was young once and given the circumstances of my age, I think I still am. Yet the burdens of my youth were never one without a singular perspective, one that drove me to the edge of depression and spiralling insanity. That was my folly of youth, the belief that my own personal hell was mine for all eternity, a black hole in which I cannot escape and one that no one can help.

It wasn't until years later until I realized that people could help and that I had a choice. My burden's may have been my own to bear, but by no means did they mean I had to bear them in misery.

Going through the misery and darkness has never meant that we are special, even if our situations are unique to ourselves. Proving that your black cat is blacker than mine doesn't change the fact that we could have tried to be better than what we have become. It doesn't change the fact that suffering is still a universal constant in life and everyone goes through it. Suffering doesn't make you any different, what you do with your suffering does.

At the end of it, we still have a choice, even if they are limited to what we would or would not do. Misery will always be bound to the pride that tells us we deserve better. Anger and frustration will always be entwined by the expectations that a good life have always coddled us by. Sometimes we have to choose between letting that pride go or living with the misery under false pretences. More often than not an easy choice that's hard to enact.

I might not have found a way to completely let go of my pride or my misery, but it doesn't mean it has to offset the things in life that are good and worth being happy for. Part of living life is to know when to make your demons an issue and when to keep it at bay. It's not worth building a reputation by being a drama queen over things that aren't worth fussing about.

Given the old cliché that I often use, we all grow old. Maybe this a moment that starts telling you to grow up.