It’s a gloomy day today. Rain is falling from the sky as the fog fills the air. Days like this, it usually gets a little hard to breathe. You feel sad for some reason. You don’t know why but you just do. You don’t want to get up for work. All you want to do is just stay in bed. But you force yourself to get up anyway. You’ve finished getting yourself ready and you stand in front of the mirror. What do you see? All you can see is a girl putting on a fake smile.
When you drive to work, the rain is pouring almost identically as the tears that fall from your eyes. Just like a waterfall. All you want to do is cry. But you can’t continue because you’re at work. While you’re at work, you have to hold it in until you get home. Until you can cry alone.
The people that you talk to on your everyday life, whether it be by phone call or text message, don’t make your day any better. Even though they say the sweetest things or nice things, it doesn’t make you laugh. It just makes you even more sad and gloomy. It’s nothing that they’ve done to you. It’s nothing that you’ve done to yourself. You just feel that way too. Your mood drops. You tear up a bit but you wipe your tears away and face those customers with a fake smile and a fake positive attitude.
When you go home, you can’t talk to your family about it. It’s not that they wouldn’t understand you. It’s just that you normally don’t open up like this to them. You face your pain alone. You face your pain with certain people. But, even then, you’d rather face it alone. You’d rather be alone so that no one can see you this way.
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So you just sit in your room, all by yourself. You have your laptop in your lap and you’re writing down whatever you’re feeling. You have the television on just so there can be background noise. But you’re not even watching. You don’t even pay attention to what’s on there. You just write and write and write. You write until you don’t have anymore words to say. You write until you can’t handle it anymore. Until you want to break down and cry. And then, you turn everything off and you just cry. You cry so hard that everything pours out. You can’t hold it in anymore. You cry until you can’t. You cry until you don’t feel this way anymore.
Then you sleep. When you wake up the next day, your mood is different. You seem happier. You seem cheerful. And you just smile for the whole day.
It’s hard to discuss the days when everything just sucks. It’s not really about what other people do to you, or the events happening in your life. It’s more of the way you are on a certain day. It’s the feeling you get when you just feel sad. Hopeless.
I don’t normally express myself like this in the day to day life. You can ask just about anyone that sees me at school or at work. I always seem to be happy and cheerful. But behind the smiles and the laughter is a girl who is having a tough time getting it together. I go to work or school with a smile on my face. A façade just to cover what I actually feel inside. But when I go home, I unwind and let everything out. I live off-campus, sharing an apartment with two other girls. Two girls that I have become close with. They can tell you the soft cries they hear coming from my room. They can tell you all about it.
It’s tough for me to talk about this subject. I don’t know if some of you go through what I go through. I don’t know what is happening in your life. I just want you to know that you’re not alone in this. No one has done anything to you, or maybe something has but it’s in the back of your head. You don’t know exactly why you feel this way but you do. I understand. I know what it’s like.
When I’m like this, and I don’t have to work or go to class, I just lay in bed all day. I have the television on just playing. I won’t pay attention to it though. I just stare up at the ceiling. Days like this, I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I just cry. Little by little until it becomes a whole bunch of tears falling like a waterfall. I cry until night falls, with little intervals in between of no tears and the feeling that you don’t care about anything at all.
Staring up at the ceiling, lots of things go through my mind. A combination of things that get you this way. School. How am I going to pay for all of this? How is my family supposed to pay for all of this? My student loans? What if I don’t do well in this class? Work. Can I ask for more hours so I can get more money? What do I do if there’s customers that are so rude to me? Money. I wish I was rich so I could pay for school all by myself and pay off my student loans. I wish I could just get up and run away. Relationships with my friends, family, and boyfriend. How do I maintain a good and stable relationship with all of them?
Sometimes I think about just dropping everything and running away. To not give a care about anything and just be by myself. To live. To be carefree. To be living well off. I see the people in my life and can’t help but envy them. I envy some of my cousins. I envy some of my friends. For being able to get out and go do something incredible with their lives. And me, I feel stuck. Stuck in the same place and I just get seem to get out of there.
Things you see in movies and televisions series, you see the beginning where it’s all happy. Then something bad that happens and the characters are all trying to solve it. And finally, the story ends with a happy ending where they live happily ever after.
Happily ever after is a fantasy. It doesn’t exist in the real world. That’s the struggle that I have to live with every day. My life isn’t a fairy tale. I can’t just wish upon a star and everything will be alright. But that’s life. Life is about living. Life is about making mistakes and learning from them. In order to really live, you have to go through many trials and obstacles. It’s one hell of a rollercoaster.
Glen Keane said, “Whatever form your dreams may take, it’s through passion and perseverance that the impossible is possible.” That’s life. You can make the impossible happen if you keep going. That’s why, even though there are days where your mood just drops, it will be okay. Just don’t lose sight of the things that matter in your life. Don’t lose hope on what you want to do in live. There is a saying that failure is success in progress. That is true. No matter how many times you fail, you learn from it and you get back up and try again. You keep going until you finally succeed. Until you are finally where you need to be.