When I was young, I had been a serious kid. I took everything so seriously. I wanted to grow up fairly quickly. I suppose I always saw adults as people who have really got it together. They always seemed to be so sure of everything, so I really wanted to be like them. I was a pretty insecure kid. I had an older brother who was just the kind of person that everybody wanted to be friends with. He was smart, funny, outgoing, and athletic. He was even part of the ever exclusive honors class in high school.

I was in a hurry to grow up. Now that I’m in my mid-twenties, I realize that adults are just as clueless as kids. They just seem like they know what they’re doing because of one thing: they are survivors. They’ve encountered pain and (at least the adults I look up to) they’ve learned to live with it. I suppose this is why I am a pain junkie. Why I throw myself into situations that ultimately cause me to get hurt. I understand that pain is the stuff that makes people strong.

Whatever the sitch was, I always bounced back fairly quickly. Until very recently. That was a particularly huge hurdle I had to get over. If you knew me, you’d know what it was, so I’m really not going to go into detail.

I read somewhere that the strongest people are the ones who’ve been through a lot. Life is messy, and one episode won’t always have a proper ending. Sometimes it’s still big and messy and open and ugly, and no matter how you try to stitch it shut, it’ll always be open. It’ll always be unfinished, and you just have to let it stay like that and move on. Just keep walking, and it’ll grow smaller and smaller and smaller over time. It’ll never be closed. And sometimes you’ll still feel that pang of regret, but if nothing can be done, if the time for that has passed, then you apply what you learn when you come across a similar situation. In the end, that’s all we can ever do, really.

And the people whose strength I admire, I think they do that. They learn to live with their own unfinished stories and use what they learned there to begin new ones.

I’m excited to start over.