No one said it'd be easy

By: Jordan

IG: @jay_lasoul

Eight months into my 23rd year

on earth and I am beginning to master and accept the fact that there is nothing you can do to prepare for the bad.

It will come, but the real challenge is in how we prevent those not so good moments from running our lives. For a long while, my motto was to not think “why me?” but rather, “why not me?” This thought process has helped pull me out of some of the lowest forms of self-pity. I thought, if the bad could happen, I’d rather it be me so no one else had to experience that hurt, misfortune, or inconvenience. But as I get older, I realize that processing takes too much energy. Convincing myself that I am “the chosen one” takes a lot of reassuring dialogue, that I don’t quite have the brain space for right now.

This is why I have since moved on to the notion that shit happens. Some you can prepare for and some that you can’t. More often, it is the latter. Honestly, there is nothing you could have done to stop that man from rear-ending you at a red light. There is no way you could have know that it was supposed to rain, when the weather app said that it would be 80 degrees and clear, so you left your umbrella at home. Truthfully, who knew. And I know I am being very topical with my examples, but apply it to the hard stuff too.

When I was a happy-go-lucky 20 year old college kid, I truly did not know that life was going to hit me hard, that survivor’s guilt was going to lead me into believing I was not worthy of being a happy college student because I left my family at home. They were facing life without me everyday and I was not there to help soften the blow. I had NO idea that when I started my sophomore year of college that I was going to have to fight for my scholarship because depression prevented me from going to class. You cannot predict those kinds of things.

Hindsight is always 20/20. After my bout with depression, I adopted the “why not me’ attitude and spent six months being the best student, friend, daughter, I knew how to be. But I spent so much time convincing myself that I am so great that I didn’t have time to truly internalize what I learned from that experience until much later.

I cannot put on a facade that displays that I take every bad moment so gracefully. My close friends and family still get an earful every now and then, I still complain in my journal, and I may or may not subtweet quotes that capture my emotions perfectly. But I don't internalize. I experience it, let it happen, and work on the rebuild.

If there is anything that you get from reading this, it is that life is not linear in the sense that you can map out how to make it work perfectly. That is the tragedy, but beauty of duality. Figuring out how to stop the bad prevents the good moments from being so sweet. The undesirable happens. Let it pass. Life has shown us all that even the worst of things don’t last always. The sun always shines after the storm.