I think. In fact, it’s safe to say that I overthink—everything. Now that I have been away from school for a week, my bored mind has been stuck in hyperdrive. So, what am I thinking about as I write this piece? 2016.

I think we can all agree that this past year is the definition of horrific. It is not necessary to provide an extensive reminder of the horrors that thrived, for I would like to finish this without wiping tears off of my keyboard. Instead, I want to look at the person I have become because I am not the woman I was one year ago. I might be a little more guarded, reluctantly more realistic, and rightly more self-invested, but I am significantly less naïve. Let me tell you why.

Ever since I learned to read, I have had a naïve heart. Love was epic, kindness prevailed, and death was a state of mind. One of my favorite quotations was from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

“Reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover because it’s irrational.”

When I read that, I viewed my life a little differently than before. The parts of my life that I couldn’t explain—the moments of joy, sadness, love, and acceptance—became precious to me. I embraced the parts of my life that were surreal; in fact, I craved them, but at a young age those surreal moments are sheltered.

This year, rather than floating in an ocean filled with young love and teenage angst, I almost drowned in reality. Instead of embracing what I didn’t understand, I cursed it. When my grandparents were weeks away from death, I would weep into my pillow begging for answers that I thought would ease my mind. Instead of writing poetry, I was drafting eulogies. Death finally became real for me, and for the first time in my life, I realized that I don’t have much time here. It was horrifying.

From that point on, I decided to take in as much as I could as quickly as possible. I constantly asked myself “Why not?” My actions were a result of impulse rather that reason and that quotation above took on a whole meaning. I quickly learned that thinking without your mind is, well, the definition of stupidity. Two months later I found myself in a relationship that completely shattered my sense of self-worth, and I’m still building it back up. I was angry. Angry that when I used my heart it was abused. Angry that if I used my mind it felt as if my life was flying by while I watched. I wanted an answer to a question that I couldn’t and still can’t come up with.

Then, one day while I was sitting in my American Lit class, my professor said something that hit me. Life is about ambiguity. There is not one universal truth—not one answer. Your answer is all that matters. And you will never know if it is right, and you will never know if it is wrong, but that is the beauty of it.

So, I thought back to the words of my beloved Tolstoy, and here is what I see. Without your mind, you live in an irrational world without any answers. That is what I would call “losing your mind.” You have to be able to determine what your answer is, even if you have no clue if it’s right or not. But without your heart, there isn’t any beauty in this world. For me, beauty stems from what we can’t explain—beauty is the irrational. I don’t know what my answer is, and I probably won’t for a long while, but rather that using literature to escape, I am going to use it find my answer, and maybe help someone else find theirs too.