The battles inside us

    There is a battle waging inside of everyone. Even the "happy" people of the world have some inner struggle, one that is unique to their individual personalities. For me, it is this deep sadness, whose icy fingers creep up on me, clawing at my soul when I least expect it. The war fluctuates, in a way. I'll be fine for days -sometimes weeks- until it consumes me, overwhelming like riptide at the ocean shore."Sadness" is rather an umbrella term, because to me, that one word means many other things:
    Depression.
    Insecurity.
    Anger.
    Fear.
   For many months I let the sadness win. I let it control my life and make me withdrawn. I let it distort my feelings so much that I became unstable, prone to completely random emotional outbursts. My thoughts became disfigured and I resigned myself to a lonely (but unreal) future where I was on the outside, as always, and no one gave a damn about me.
    That was not so long ago, but to me it feels like a thousand years have passed, that I'm living a different life now because I am such an altered person. It's not that I triumphantly overcame my emotional struggle, had myself a happily ever after, and tied it all up with a big bow and a "The End". I am much more of a realist than that, I have discovered. I have also discovered that our problems here on earth never truly end. There will  always be a battle- but are you ready to fight the good fight? Because to be blunt, it is always going to suck. There's no getting around that. You can never be totally free of unhappiness- no one can. And it's so important not to look at your own life and think there is something wrong with you because everyone else looks perfect on the outside and you don't. The difference between them and you is that you see the version of them that they project to the rest of the world, while you see every facet of your not-so-glamorous life. You see all your flaws and shortcomings. You are the only one who sees your brokenhearted self crying on the bathroom floor. You live with yourself every single day, and when you compare yourself to others, you think "I'm not normal. I'm not good enough. I struggle, but no one else does- why?"
    It's this dizzying cycle that sometimes makes me want to give it all up. But...I am learning to fight the good fight. I am going to battle this sadness throughout my entire life, because I'm (tragically) just like everyone else. And, yeah, I'm going to have good and bad days, and I'm going to fake a lot of smiles and break down from time to time, but I will be fighting the good fight. I won't give up- on myself, on other people, on the world. This place is a mess, full of messy, struggling people who lie about their messes and cry in the shower so no one knows what they're really going through. And I feel like people could work together to do great things in the world if we were just honest with each other. Because who wants to join forces with "perfect" people?
--Laura :)
 

About Me

    I have spent the past several months asking myself a question over and over again: who am I? And it has only become clear to me very recently that there isn't a straight answer to that question. I think I somewhat expected myself to fit into a box, or a specific category, because I tend to expect other people to thrive under the titles I give them: The Smart One, The Sweet One, The Funny One. You get the picture. But since my expectations for other people were very high, I tended to get let down or upset every time someone did not fit in their box, or stepped outside of it. I spent so much time trying to figure out what my box was, looking for myself and where I belonged. In the end I got extremely frustrated and depressed, on the point of giving up because I felt that I didn't have a place anywhere, that my personality was too inconsistent for anyone to tolerate.
    But then I realized something- something that most people understand from a very young age, or are inundated with by their parents: people are, in reality, too complicated to be just one thing at a time. We are a startling mess of creatures from day one, and though we may try to generalize and dismiss someone with a laugh and a simple "oh, you're such a (fill in the blank)" it does not honestly work like that. I stumbled upon a quote that sums up this fascinating predicament:

  “To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”--Anthony Doerr

I like to speak in quotes on occasion. I also make up some sayings of my own. I can be really sweet and endearing one moment, and completely sarcastic and cynical the next. I have days where I am extremely self motivated, and days where getting out of bed takes an act of God. I am both an optimist and a pessimist, depending on what day of the week it is. In conclusion, I am an utterly inconsistent human being. I do not fit in a box, and that is okay! A lot of the time I am a totally different person depending on who I'm around. It's not that I'm two-faced, it's that different people leave different impressions on me, and make me comfortable or uncomfortable. And it has taken me seventeen years to understand that this conundrum of Self, the one I battle with on a daily basis, is normal. I love that- thinking something you do is unspeakably weird, only to find out that everyone else does it, to your immense relief.
    But I'm not always different. Certain things about me will probably always stay the same- things that not many people know about. Like my unquenchable desire to travel the world, and my deep love of Harry Potter (I kid you not, my Hogwarts allegiance runs deeper than anyone may know). I think a lot, which is not always a good thing, but I am learning to channel my thoughts towards something besides self-hatred and what other people think of me (like this blog. I find writing about my emotions to be very cathartic). I have a really small attention span, and -although it hurts my sarcastic pride to admit this- I am somewhat of a hopeless romantic.
    So, this is me. I'm a mess of different feelings and traits, all jumbled up inside a small and unlikely-looking person. But I kind of like that I can be like this- that everyone is full of different emotions that may not make sense, but are what make them who they are. And I love how different people can bring out different qualities in a person, sometimes good and sometimes bad. It's the tragic mystery of the human soul that makes me want to stick around for a long, long time, because maybe someday, I just might figure it out.
--Laura :)