She had reached a low point. Probably the lowest of lows. Two weeks sent directly from Hell. Well, in the grand scheme of things, not really. It could be considered a cakewalk compared to the lives of any hard-working adult or, God, one of the millions living in poverty. But comparisons are useless when everything is relative, so she would still consider it the worst two weeks of her life.

Something unique happens when you sleep through a persistent hour’s worth of alarms, get the skin cut off your ankle from a particularly evil pair of shoes, have a mental breakdown over a bio lab, deal with your laptop constantly facing what seems to be a computer version of an autoimmune deficiency disease, remember that your GPA is the embodiment of disappointment, overdose on Girl Scout cookies between your tears, etc. OK, maybe not unique, maybe just absolutely devastatingly terrible and downright sad. For the college student, I have to keep reminding myself, these are average lows, even minor missteps, and compared to what could have happened are not by any means immensely unfortunate. But at the time, they were. They absolutely were, and it was completely valid of me to feel like it was the end of the world.

I never wanted to accept that I could be even slightly depressed because even my name means “happiness,” and it’s not a persistent sadness of being not good enough, it’s just an every-now-and-then feeling. Maybe more? Like a good cry at least three times a week? I don’t know. Regardless of whether or not it’s anything serious, I really do believe everyone feels that way and worries that it might be.

But the thing about the worst weeks ever is that they feel the worst at the moment, or even for the next few weeks. Until they don't. Until things get better, and they always do. I find it both difficult but comforting to remind myself that in the bigger picture of the universe, the things that bother me now will not matter at all in five years or even one year. We will inevitably look back on low points and tell ourselves that, yes, they were horrible. But not that horrible compared to what could have been. I know that I have dealt with much more stress in previous years, and if I survived the worst before, then I can survive anything else.

It's the resiliency in dealing with these lows that makes us stronger. It’s common sense and something that we’ve always been told growing up, but it’s just refreshing to be reminded of it every so often. To be able to pull yourself up and keep moving forward is too often understated and only learned the hard way. But once you do learn it, you see the sun again. And during that lowest week, a quote by Walt Disney kept me sane: “Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things. Curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” So that’s just what I continue to do—move onward and upward from every low.

All of this will be worth it someday. It has to be.