A Night of Watery Cliches

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.

Life Transplant.. NBD.

It's weird how fast you adjust to a whole new life. The transition between high school and college was hard, I'll admit. But once you get here and starting getting in the grove, it's hard to remember you've only been here a few weeks. You learn to cook and go grocery shopping when you no longer have food. You force yourself to do homework when you don't have a mom telling you need to do it. You wake yourself up, go to class at a school that is 16x bigger then your high school. And you do all of that with different friends and teachers then you had just a month ago.
I'm telling you, it's weird. It amazes me just how resilient the brain is. You don't really have a choice to go back home, so you force yourself onward. I do miss home, and I miss it a lot. I miss the dumb things we did in Politics each day, singing in choir. I miss the predictability of church at home; you knew where you were going to sit in Sunday School, what everyone's names were and where to hide when you didn't want your family to find you just quite yet. I miss trying to block out my little brother's screams as I did my homework every night. I miss my family and my friends faces, personalities and how well they knew you.
But even with all of this, you don't have a choice to live in the past. You float, swim, or drown. I'm just starting to float and feel comfortable with my new life. Soon, it will be time to swim to the edge of where  college can put me.
So here is the thing. Don't give up. Keep swimming, even when the tide is against you. At least you aren't in a foreign country with bad guys trying to kill you. And if you are... well why are you reading this? You should be running right now!!!
One more thing; I love Disney movies. A lot. But we had to analyze The Little Mermaid for three minutes in film today. The themes were; If you run away, disobey your parents and sell part of yourself to a witch, a handsome young prince will sweep you off your feet and fall in love with you anyways. Apparently the seaweed is always greener in somebody else's lake.
Whatever Disney, I'm perfectly content with my own life thank you very much! I already ran away from home and well I probably stay out later then my parents would care to know. But there is no way I'm selling my voice for some dude. Do you know how many guys are here? Ariel, you got it all wrong. Love your life.