Anyone who knows me in person knows that I absolutely love quotes. Quotes, have gotten me through some of the hardest and darkest moments in my life. This might sound odd, but sometimes I just need someone else to put the words that I'm thinking into written words. While I was scrolling through Pinterest one day, I found a quote that forever changed my perspective on life.
"It is okay to not be okay. If you are not okay, you don't have to pretend that you are okay. You can ask for help"
It's okay to not be okay. If any of you are like me, you are afraid of people seeing you in a moment of weakness. Reflecting on a lot of the experiences in which I've said I was "fine" or told my friends that I was just "tired", I've realized something; I was not okay. No one wants to be seen as someone who is fragile or weak. I pretended to be the smiley, happy girl that most people know me as. In the end, I hurt even more because I was masking and ignoring my feelings. I was afraid to ask anyone for help. I didn't want to be known as the needy friend or the person that had to pay to see a therapist. A very good friend of mine was giving me advice while I was going through a difficult time and she told me something that I will never forget.
"Morgan, your feelings are valid."
I'm not sure why I needed someone to validate my feeling, but it has changed my way of looking at difficult times. I believe this is a statement that all of us can learn from. We need to understand that we are allowed to show our emotions and accept our emotions without the fear of being judged. We fear too much that others are going to look at us as weak; who cares if we have a moment of weakness. It's called being a human.
The last part of the quote talks about asking for help. This has changed a lot of how I've lived my life over the past few years. I struggled a lot my senior year of high school. I had pretty much lost hope with everything because I was pretending to be okay and most things weren't okay. I was going to have to leave my parents in the fall to attend college. I was losing my friends because they were going to school, or we were just at different moments in our life. My anxiety was out of control. I committed myself to too many activities, everything in my life just wasn't okay.
I decided to do something about this, I reached out to a wonderful woman who had the title of a Lifecoach. I was 100 percent against this, I didn't want to go, however, my mom was made me. I was angry, but now I'm so glad that I went. My life has forever been changed. Being able to talk to someone about the emotions that I was experiencing and the worries that were going through my head was the decision that I made. I had someone that was "on my team". Someone who was able to build a "box of tools" that I could use in order to have success the rest of my senior year, and beyond. I was able to gain a new perspective on life because every session that I had with my life coach; I left feeling like I had a plan and I was going to be able to work on my plan. I was reminded that even if things weren't okay, my life wasn't over. Even if things weren't okay at the time, I would find new opportunities for success. At that moment, I decided that I didn't care if I had to ask for help. I didn't care if it made me look "weak". I am now okay with not being okay all the time because I know that it doesn't define my strength. My strength is defined by what I do to overcome these obstacles in this crazy adventure that we call life.
