So here we go, are you ready for this?
It's oK to cry. It's OK to have days where you cry six times. It's OK to have days where you can't even leave your bed. It'sOK to have days when you feel unsure. It's OK to have days where you need a little reassurance. It's OK to want that. It's OK to have days where nothing is wrong but it feels like everything is. It's OK to have bad days. You are still a good person on your bad days.
It's OK to slide down the wall in tears at three in the morning, aching and screaming. If you want to sit on your bedroom floor with your head buried in your knees, tears spilling out of your eyes and filling the room to your waist, do it. It doesn't make you weak. You could never be weak. You're alive and that's the hardest thing to be sometimes. I'm proud of you. Always.
It's OK to feel it, and it hurts. Oh God, I know it hurts, but it will be okay. This pain won't last, and if it is here for while, I'll be here. So it's OK to hurt, just don't hurt alone. You'll go through spells where you feel that maybe you're too sensitive for this world. I certainly feel that.
The light always comes after the darkness. J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, "The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief it still grows, perhaps the greater."
Vincent Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because he thought it would bring happiness inside of him. Although a lot of people thought he was insane for eating toxic paint, beside the fact that eating a materialistic object such as paint could correlate into someone's emotions. However, many people try to do the same thing today even at a young age. When we are so unhappy, the strangest ideas have the possibilities of making us feel worthy, loved, and happy, like painting the walls of your organs yellow. Its really no different than falling in love or hurting yourself, there is a risk of getting your heart broken or making permanent damage, but people do it everyday because there is always the chance that it could make things better.
Everyone has their yellow paint.
My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart.
I need you to know that you are stronger than you give yourself credit for. That you are stronger than the voices In your head, and that you have more control over them than you believe. So tonight, when the sun goes down and the voices come out to play, go to the mirror. Look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself how fierce you are. Tell yourself that the voices are wrong, that your friends don't hate you, that you can succeed and that you will learn to be OK again. You need to fight for yourself and for your happiness, because no one will do it for you and you cannot let the voices win.
No one has the right to judge you, because no one really knows what you have been through. They might have heard the stories, but they didn't feel what you have felt in your heart.
Let me tell you a hard and cold truth...No matter what choice you make, it doesn't define you. Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do multiple good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there is ever a choice you've made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice. You are not determined by your experiences, you are self-determined by the meaning you give to them; and when you take experiences as the base of life you are going to be misguided and let off path to some degree. You determine yourself by the meaning you give to the situations you're given.
There was once a girl who believed. She believed she could shine in the darkest sky, she could swim in the deepest ocean. She knew herself well and what is more intriguing than a woman who knows her strength?
Go outside and let your breath be stolen away. Find the forests, seek the seas, and meditate on the mountains that are mist covered from the morning. We are nurtured by nature and born for the wild places; we have no business in cities, in buildings taller than the trees can grow. Go outside and begin living again.
The light will leak in. It always does, somehow always finds a way in (remember to thank it). I know dark days will come, I know the sun can be slow to rise and hesitant to linger some days, but it will ALWAYS leak in. You'll be there, shadow soaked and grinning in the darkness, chasing the little droplets of sunshine.
Then you become the light.
Build someone up. Put their insecurities to sleep. Remind them they're worthy. Tell them they're magical. Be a light in a too often dim world.
And most importantly,
Stay alive everybody.
It's worth it, I promise.
