Hurting But Still Thankful

Today, the world greeted me with a cold, gray, and unforgiving beauty that made me feel just as dark -- what a perfect day to cry, to go over all the things that are not going well, and to examine my life in black and white.

Lying on my bed, I stared at the ceiling for a while and thought about the things that I could do and could have done. It was like this endless loop of images in my head showing me the things that I wanted to be, the places that I wanted to go, and the opportunities that I missed.

What do I do now?

One of my teachers back in law school once told us that we should always be grateful for all that we have - we are lucky to be in school, he said, and to have a roof over our head and something to eat when we're hungry.

He told us that we should always think with the end in mind, which is to be successful, and that we should not let our unhappiness get in the way of doing what we have to do. He pointed out that we have so much going for us that to be sad is to be downright ungrateful for how blessed we are.

He has a point. On many levels, what he said was true to an extent. I know that we are blessed in more ways than we can count, and to be sad despite all of our blessings seems shallow and petty. There are so many children in the world going hungry right now, abused animals being abandoned, and forests being destroyed that to mull over our own imperfections seems selfish.

Yet what my teacher said also twisted something that is so inherently human in us all and turned it into something that it's definitely not - that to be sad is to be selfish and ungrateful, and that because we're not in the worst of cases, we don't have a right to be. 

Everything in this world is relative. What may be a mole hill to me might be a mountain to some, what I may find daunting may be easy as hell for you, and what we may find trivial might mean a lot to someone else.

My point is, we are all fighting battles that no one knows about, and to judge someone all because you think their problem is not as bad as yours or as that of others is treading dangerously into murky waters that you have absolutely no idea how deep the water is.

Sadness is part of what makes us human. Hell, even selfishness and discontentment are inherent human follies that all of us deal with at certain points in our lives.

We've all been there - we want something we don't have and maybe even long for something that we can't have, even beyond the realm of reason. And as they are, those are not exactly bad things to feel. What's important is that we acknowledge those things and do something about them.

You want to be a doctor? Study hard and work on your degree. You want to buy a car? Work your ass off even harder to get that.

These desires, these longings, these fundamentally human wants may seem insignificant taken in light of world famine, child abuse, poverty, and other unfortunate plights of the world but they exist and it's not right to just sweep them under the rug just because it's only personal to you and not to everybody else.

There are days when the darkness can get a little overwhelming, there are days when it's hard to get out of bed simply because your heart is too heavy, there are days when it's hard to see the point of holding on.

There are simply bad days when we feel like crap, regardless of what we have. There are just days when our insecurities get the better of us, and we want to cry and not want to face the world. That's okay. It doesn't mean we're not thankful for what we have.

What's not alright is judging someone to be selfish and ungrateful all because of what we see on the surface. What's not okay is thinking that someone doesn't have the right to be sad, all because he has what we think is enough.

At the end of the day, we don't have the right to dismiss someone's sadness as shallow and petty. Most of the time, we don't know the whole story and have no idea of the extent of its underlying issues.

While I know my professor meant well and it's nice to encourage people to work hard, I just wish more people would understand that sadness is not about being ungrateful. 

#iamizobelle #sadness #emotionalturmoil #unhappy #selfish #teacher