We have grown up hearing the timeless cliche, "just be yourself." That is a powerful statement. Few generations have been allowed such freedom of individual expression. If you want to be a punk, go for it. Valley girl? Right on. The only thing you can do wrong is not to be yourself.
So what if you want to be yourself, but you have lost sight of who you are?
Most of us have also heard the cliche, "When it rain, it pours." Sometimes life pours problems so persistently and so hard that it quickly turns into an ocean you find yourself struggling to swim in. It takes all concentration to just keep your head up out of the water. All familiar objects are drowned, and the guideposts you marked to help you gain bearing over your surroundings are now covered in the water. You frantically tread water, just hoping, praying, you can wait until the sun comes out and the water sinks back into the dirt. Hope. Pray. Hope. Pray. It is an exhausting cycle. It rains harder. The sun sometimes comes out, basks your face in warmth to remind you that you can make, clouds pass, normalcy returns. But what do you do until the water is gone? Sometimes your strength is gone. Sometimes it is just to much.
Water, much like the problems life throws at us, spurs growth. But water, much like the problems life throws at us, drowns out fire. It drowns the spark.
When you reach that point, just keep treading water. That's all one can do. One cannot control the sky, cloud coverage, or the inches of rain that fall. One cannot control when the sun comes out and how long it stays. The only thing one can control is if they sink or swim.
I choose to swim.
