"There's a whole world out there, Ryan," I told myself over and over again over the last year.

At the time, I was only just giving myself dopamine-rush hope. At the time, I didn't really believe it, but I just thought, in the midst of the hardest time and depressing time of my life, that the outside world, a drastic change of environment would change things.

Now, however, I'm an inner-city teacher in Baltimore City. I love my city. I love my kids. Despite the obvious challenges the city faces, from a high murder rate to homelessness, addiction, and poverty, Baltimore has taught me how to have hope despite seemingly insurmountable circumstance.

In almost every way, despite the challenges, I'm in a much better place now than I was then. Baltimore has healed me from my final year in college. I joke with my friends all the time that my last year in college was just hazing to prepare me to be a great teacher for my school, but there's a lot of truth to that joke, just like there's some truth to most jokes. The adage in Romans 5 to embrace suffering to produce endurance, character, and hope. And my time suffering has certainly made me a better and more understanding person as I face the brutish, nasty, and short nature of adult life, and especially in an inner-city environment like Baltimore City.

"World is a beauty now, at least that's what they tell me," says Cutty from "The Wire," to a Dukie, who gets jumped and beat up nonstop by the other kids on the street.

I have come to realize that only hindsight gives you wisdom. How I carry myself in the classroom and in my daily interactions with other people. The world was beautiful then, and it is now. Only that it is a separate world you go because of the people in each place, because of the environment you traverse. I used to be in a small college campus. Now, I'm in the best city in the world in Baltimore, one with the public spotlight on it all the time, with the problems of any city in the United States, only on steroids.

I get into aggressive traffic and driving while on the busiest roads of Baltimore. I drive around the block for 30 minutes at a time looking for a space to park, and often spaces too small for my SUV to parallel park into. I get heckled and called homophobic slurs on my runs. I don't have to go far to see a homeless addict navigating a busy intersection, or kids the age of my students operating an open-air drug market on a corner in the hood.

The frustration of this world, in the city, is real. Only they are so much slighter than the psychological agony I went through in my final year at Emory University. It is here, in this world, that the underside of life is put in your face as egregiously as it is in the inner city.

But I find myself far more at peace, and joy, being in this world of genuine struggle and community than the world I used to be in. Yes, there are problems, but it just feels, well, different. At least these problems are a whole lot of people wrestling and converging to solve, rather than an isolated individual. At least these problems have solidarity and hope.

And I can't explain it or put a finger on what's different, but I have been doing so much better than I was. Baltimore and the people in it cured the depression and hopelessness I felt for a whole year. God has granted me grace and hope here.

So when you're in that spot, when you're in the place and stage in your life where you feel like everything's falling apart and there is no hope, know that there's a whole world out there. And though that world seems like it might be impossible to get to, and though you might feel like you're trapped and in a cage, it's worth the chance of trying out.