The Tough Road Ahead

“The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool”. Said by Stephen King, it can be stuck to anyone’s life, no matter what situation one may find themselves in. Trust is a tool that has been abused since the dawn of mankind, and only continues to be misused to this day. I’m sure as we all leave our childhood behind and  journey into adulthood and independence begins, many of us are ambitious to set off, and we will all be eager to trust nearly everything that comes towards us that promises us aid in our travels. Here is where I offer you a warning.

All my life, as far back into my memories as I can go, I can remember being anxious, naive, and hesitant about change. I would be over reliant and always had expected a good outcome, simply because that’s what everyone said it would be like. “Change is exciting” they said, “be optimistic and everything will go your way”. It was only until I got to middle school that I realized that everything that I had heard was wrong. Friends that I had kept close had drifted, and new ones came. I found myself watching cliques form, and the individuals, these simple proteins that once inhabited Earth’s primordial soup lost their individuality, and create more complex, uniform organisms. Schoolwork became more and more difficult, and I found it hard to keep up. The work I had once found fun had now begun to bore me, and I was struck with one of my worse plagues: procrastination. As school continued, it only got worse for me, as I fell down a steep rabbit hole, procrastinating more and more, all the while facing extreme anxiety and depression which still reside within me today. I felt as though I was a disappointment to many, and yet I felt as though I couldn’t fix a thing about it. Change hit me hard, and I fell harder. I was confused, frustrated, and angry about my situation, and how all the morals I held on to throughout my childhood, the morals I had trusted, had all lied to me. Now don’t get me wrong, I had an amazing childhood, there’s nothing I can complain about, I just caught off guard by said change.

It was then my father, the man who had lived through it all, gave me this piece of advice: the world is going to be hell. There will be people who you don’t like that you are forced to work with. There will be things forced upon you that you don’t agree with. You will be stuck in situations that are completely unfair, and there’s no way to combat that. The only thing you can do is work hard and earn yourself the good life that you were told about.

It’s this advice that I used to get me through many hardships in the years following, and I know that I’ll use in my years ahead of me, and it is the same advice that I give you. Take this warning and carry it with you. Stay strong in times of desperation, keep true to your beliefs, and don’t let anyone step all over you. Stay steadfast, for there is an end to the tunnel, but whether you come out in the day or the night is up to you.

Photo by Hunter Spencer