As I grow up, I realize more and more how fragile life is. My childhood seems like another lifetime ago. It was a time when I didn’t have to face the realities of growing up and encountering life challenges because I thought I lived in a perfect world. I thought that everything around me was part of this world and really, I was too naive to realize that life can have hardships. At the age of 5, I never imagined myself suffering the pain of my first heartbreak, or the uncertainty of going off to college, or the pain I felt from losing childhood friends I thought I would be close with forever. As a young adult in her first year at college, I know now that life will present you challenges, and that that perfect world you lived in as a child, is not reality. But we can’t be children about it, crying until someone takes the pain away, or insisting that our life is ruined forever, because this is the mentality of a young child, and it’s one that isn’t realistic. This mentality is one of someone who does not know yet that pain and suffering, whether it’s emotional or physical, is just a part of life.

One day we will all grow up to have a life of our own. The people who we were so close with our whole lives, friends and family, they’ll be moving on too. Some of them may even pass on. I guess my true point in all of this is that just because life knocks you down sometimes, it doesn’t mean you have to accept defeat. We have to keep on moving no matter how hard it may be. If you’re a college student reading this, let me tell you that right now, as young adults, we have so much more of our life to fulfill and so much more to look forward to. In 20 years, we will look back on these times hopefully with a sense of self-reflection. We’ll look back and realize how we were able to get through those hard, maybe heart-wrenching experiences. These life moments that knocked us down and threw us for a loop really only helped us to see that picking ourselves back up again was the best thing for us. We came out on the other end stronger and more mature. Being able to conquer the pain and the hardship is really quite simple to explain. It’s all part of growing up, and facing the fact that sometimes all you can do is pick yourself up again after you fall down.