|
|
an open space for youth writing & mental health discussion
|
 A. Apples- There’s a fresh bag of apples in the fridge. She only grabs one to enjoy the sour and tarty flavor of the green fruit. When she finishes one, the overwhelming feeling of needing more consumes her as she goes back for another. One apple after another; she can’t help herself. Soon she goes back only to stick her hand in an empty bag. Now she is left feeling sick to her stomach and everyone mad at her for eating all the apples.
B. Bottomless Pit- They call her stomach a bottomless pit from her nonstop eating and never getting full. It’s as if her stomach holds no food as she chows down, not even stopping to breathe. When everyone is out for the count and can eat no more, she still lingers around for something else. Her stomach is a bottomless pit; she needs more.  A few years ago, I saw a Ted Talk by John Green. I didn't know much about him at the time, but his message of how learning is the meaning of life resonated with me. He talked about how YouTube is a good platform for learning things, if you know where to look. This brought out the excitement for learning new things that I had felt as a child when I watched movies and TV and absorbed things from them.
 It’s unfortunate that blessings and curses are often indistinguishable at face value. We find ourselves chasing ideas or hopes that only seek to make our lives harder and often ignore that which could easily make us happy. That’s really what it means to be a human, I guess. We’re idealists living in an imperfect world and while we strive for perfection, while we pine after symmetry, the universe continues to overpower us with confusion and meaninglessness. We constantly look for the black and white in the world. Our binary perceptions are so deeply ingrained into the societies we have built. Good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral, X and Y. We attempt to weave the fabric of reality with only 2 strings of opposing colors.
 Anxiety. What does it mean? What even is it?
The definition of it is “an overcoming feeling of worry or nervousness." In some circumstances I can relate to that; it is worry. It is nervousness. However, it is so much more that that feeling.  For the longest time, fifteen years to be exact, I dreamed of growing up to be a ballerina. I took my first ballet class at the age of three after begging my parents to sign me up. My initial years of ballet were exactly as I had imagined before starting; I wore a pink leotard with pink tights and pink ballet slippers, as I leapt around freely and marveled in the magic of the yearly production of The Nutcracker.
 I have always considered waves to be one of the most beautiful aspects of nature to exist.
Their constant motion and ability to start over again and again in spite of whoever looks on exemplifies resilience to me, and I have loved this idea because it was a needed reminder that people always have the ability to move forward, as long as they let themselves do so. |
