The best life lessons are the ones that we didn’t really want.

When life presents opportunities for us to grow, we often say stick our know-it-all noses in the air: like we must know better than whatever life wants to tell us.

The only lessons we actually end up learning, are the ones that we spend years trying to flush down the toilet. Like that annoying bird that wakes us up on our "lazy days" or the raccoon that keeps getting into our garbage cans... we sometimes can't help but ask - can you just go away growth?

Although the best lessons love to take us by the throat, choke us, and bully us into accepting who they are, within all their nastiness, they mold us into people greater than we thought we could be.

I am eighteen, and I learned that working hard shows strength, but working too hard shows weakness.

For the first two years of high school, all I did was cover up my problems with biology books, chemistry homework, and “perfect” test scores. School praised me, school loved me and I was okay with that. I needed that. But the person who I was on the inside was not shown with the glowing pen of my teachers 100%. I may have been a perfect student, but I was nowhere near a perfect human.

The hard times in my life grew more complex and challenging. My way of coping was distracting myself with ballet and books.

I danced every day until I couldn’t feel my toes and I studied everyday until the only thing that I thought about on Saturdays in the church was biology. It was an addiction, both dancing and studying. The evil and destruction lied in the way that I viewed myself and my family. The more I learned about what I could do and be with “good grades” and a “good college” the more I hated the life and parents I had. I went through a time when I was so depressed that I would say the evilest things to my mom and dad. I was the devil at home, and an angel in school.

The pain I was experiencing at the time was increased with my hatred for everything and everyone. No matter how many A’s I got, they were not good enough. No matter how much weight I lost, it still was not enough. There was no way to be perfect, but I kept chasing after the perfection that I wanted for my life. A perfect that did not exist.

Often my friends and family questioned why I studied so much. I would just say “I like it” or “I’m good at it” but in reality, it was my escape. When I wasn’t studying, I felt disgusting, with this vicious craving to learn something. All that consumed my mind was perfection.

I felt so guilty about how I treated my parents and brother. I felt so guilty about the hatred in my heart that I acquired for them that to numb the pain I forced myself to feel extreme pain elsewhere. The more I ignored it, the more I hated myself. The more I hated myself, the more I wanted to be someone else. I couldn’t escape.

I am eighteen, and I learned that working hard shows strength, but working too hard shows weakness.

Tune in next week for the next section of my book!