It has become more than noticeable that it is hard to be grateful for something that hurts so bad. Every day we push ourselves to newer and higher limits, or at least, I like to believe that the best of us do. We push ourselves to succeed in new challenges, fail in others, and to create order in the mass entropy that we are lost in. With each day, we become a little stronger and a little closer to what we thought we wanted. We get there. We get there quicker, easier, and less painful than we could have ever imagined, to then be let down. We sit in our pity and misery only to remind ourselves that we must be grateful for what we have done, where we are and what we have accomplished. But we are no longer grateful, we are weak.

We are weak because we can no longer stand up to the challenge ahead of us. We have tried to accomplish success in our strengths and we have only failed. We have failed because the standard of success has been set before we had a chance to create it ourselves. We have learned to measure our success on the wrong elements, the ones that have been thought to make us happy. So, we continue to be weak in the eyes of those who have watched us grow. We question our work, our achievements, and our gains because they no longer give us pride in ourselves. As opportunity arises we choose to step back. In taking this step back, we are burying ourselves further into our weakness. We become comfortable in our self-absorbed depression. A truth is here to be faced, one that only the luckiest of us will get to understand. A truth raveled in agony. Our dreams have become our nightmares. We are now here to live the pain.

Our pain now has a chance to define us, if we allow it to. We must choose to let it define us for the better, to grow from this. In order to understand ourselves, we must feel this uncomfortable. Our discomfort will push us to anger, thus pushing us to strive. Anger, as I see it, is one of our strongest feelings. Picture it. Picture a time you have been so angry, you feel like the whole world is against you and at this very second, you have the ability to take it all over. You have the ability to change the world in these few seconds of rage. So take it. Take this pictured feeling and use it. Steer your anger to a place where it seems like the whole world isn't against you. A place where your weakest moment has become your strongest. Allow gratitude to infuse your anger until once again, you must picture it. Picture the pain you were in, the people you have failed, the weakness you have subsided to, and remember: you have been weak, you have been ungrateful, you have been angry, you have been uncomfortable, and you have changed.

We have changed. We have become grateful in an image of misery. Through this misery we have been misunderstood, our ideas have been fluttered with doubt and discomfort. We have found a place in which our hearts and brains are tied, choose to flourish in it. Flourish in the complexity of gratitude.