Youthful Life: X

"The people in your life fill two distinct roles ― fruit pickers and fertilizers. Fruit pickers require you to give of yourself. Fertilizers renew your spirits. In a healthy friendship or relationship, it’s normal for people to fill both roles. But sometimes, we become so comfortable in the roles we play with the people closest to us, we forget to occasionally switch roles." Kiara Imani Williams Check on your checker . As someone who often spends much of their time checking on other people, ensuring their okay, being a listener, and giving others advice on how to solve the problems they face, I have come to realize that the relationships I sometimes form cannot actually be reciprocated. I mean to say that because I have established this dynamic of being a "fixer" of sorts, those that I am in relationship with play into it and/or forget to check on me. I think it's two-fold in that those I check on may not realize I too need to be cared for, and I myself do ...

Truth - it may sound cliché but life really is a journey and its one of epic proportions. From start to finish life keeps you on your toes. You can never really know what's going to come up next, if you did then you'd miss out on all the suspense. That's the aspect of our lives that makes our stories so great, the ambiguity, the anxiousness, and the not knowing. We're tasked with taking what comes our way and working with it the to best of our ability. No one ever life would be easy or predictable. Time to write our own new epic - this is odyssey. “Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.”  Homer the Odyssey Does anyone else have vivid memories of their high school English classes and reading story after story to no end. They may have ruined my love for reading (apparently I have a problem with authority) but there definitely are certain stories I remember well. Homer's the Odyssey is one of them. Who can ever forget ...

The 20s are all about adjustments. The thing about college is that every year, every month, every week, and every single day are different. You literally never know what will happen. For me it feels like a random compilation of horribly epic awkward moments, and naively innocent oversights. It's a place of novelty, danger, and knowledge. It's like some sort of twisted social experiment (like the Real World ); late teens and early twenty-somethings picked to live on campus and find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. But what happens when you want miss home. This is homesick. The school year has barely started and I already want to go home. It's like I dread every single day being here. Whether it's because this semester has come with the biggest changes so far, or that nonsense last weekend or a genuine distress over being so far from home, the world may never know. I would venture not very far to say that the feelings of homesickn...

Being a teenager is all about dealing with loss. The reality of life is that we can't always win, there will be times where we lose. If we never lose then we never learn to recover, strengthen ourselves and move on. All things come to an end, even life itself. It's the most difficult thing that anyone can deal with, let alone comprehend, but it's apart of the world we live in. We all fall down, but we have people there to pick us right back up. Death , that is the end of a life. The thing about death is that it's so final. There's nothing you can do when it comes knocking on your door. You can beg, plead, and even try to bargain with the angel of death, the grim reaper, or all those bearers of bad news. It's all useless. Death knows no limits, it doesn't play fair, and it's indiscriminate towards who it takes and when it takes them. One minute someone is here, and the next they are gone. There are so many questions I have when it comes to death. It ...

Being a teenager is all about dealing with everything, that includes yourself and others. You have to be on it or face the consequences. The slightest differentiation from your "normal" self (the one that everyone sees) means there must be something terribly wrong. If you're not being you must be pissed, depressed, or "in a bad mood." Nope, that's not it - I'm just tired. I have the right to let it all hang out every once in a while, to show a different of myself, and to not be judged for it. Sometimes you have to show all 50 shades of gray, and other times you just fade to gray. Fading to gray is all about dealing with things as they come. Whether it be good or bad news, you either show out or retreat back into yourself. You fade, you cringe, you rescind inwards and protect yourself. You shy away from others, lose a little bit of your pep and you might be a little down in the dumps. Express how you feel and do you - fade to gray.   One of my f...

Being a teenager is all about knowing when you've got to take a minute just to pause. Take a moment, wait a while and just be where you are. Then you've got to rewind like those old cassettes once you're done taking your time. Reflect like really did that just happened? Finally it's time to press play and go on. This is pause, rewind, and play. Just pause, stop what you're doing. Stop reading this post, and let your mind be at rest. Be at peace wherever you are, whoever you are, and however you found this post. Take a second, breath, and continue on. September 11th, 2001 - a day that will forever go down in American history as one of the most tragic. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard the news about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers, Pentagon, and the downed flight in that Pennsylvania field. I was eight years old, in third grade, and randomly in the middle of class my teacher turned on the television. It wasn't something we did very of...