sometimes it’s hard. being on the threshold of your life, between innocent childhood and naive adulthood, feels so terrifying that you doubt you’ll ever become the person you aspire to be. you’re filled with ideas and lofty dreams, yet the ground you’re lying on is way too far from the sky you’re yearning to reach.

i’m at this point exactly. i’ve already passed my 18th year and grew so much that the more i learned the more naive and scared i felt. i’ll become 19 in a few days, and i don’t know what to expect. every new year of my life could be the best or the worst, and i’ve had my share of both, and now i’m not even sure of which one i’m more afraid. the bad years hurt, but they teach, and the good ones.. well they come with the fear of their end, the anticipation of the inevitable turn.

whatever these coming months will bring, i pray they’ll be accompanied by a wind of grace. i pray that along these days my darkness will be lifted and new light will permeate my life. i pray, and i pray, and i pray, and hope that my voice is not an empty echo in the air.

The other day, I had a thought-provoking conversation with a classmate. We were talking about our academic weaknesses, and this sentence came out of my mouth: “What’s the point of being aware of your weaknesses if you weren’t working towards bettering yourself?”

I instantly realized that I was saying it to her as much as I was knocking the door of my own conscience. Academically speaking (since we were at uni), I’m good at writing and not so good at presenting out loud, and she’s the opposite. So while I’m advising her to open the door instead of shutting it by dooming herself as “bad at writing and it’s just the way it is,” I’m also nudging myself to open up my own personal potential and dare to get out there and present my ideas into people’s ears rather than writing it for their eyes to read.

Then we talked about our strengths. She complimented my writing and I followed my thanks by reminding her of her excellent skills at presenting, telling a story, and grasping the attention of the audience. I then found myself saying that as much as I criticize myself and hide allot of my writing never to see the light of day, I nevertheless must believe that I am good at writing.

I absolutely and undoubtedly ought to believe that I’m good at writing. I simply can’t afford not to. What would be the purpose of my life had I given in to such lousy self-limiting beliefs? I’m confident in my writing not because it’s the only thing I feel naturally and effortlessly good at, but because it’s the thing that gives meaning to all other aspects of my life. Writing helps me understand what I’m going through; it helps me feel truly grateful  for my pain and failure as I watch my turmoil turn into chains of words that gracefully narrate a story and invoke a movement of thought and emotion in the reader’s consciousness.

Each one of us has something unique to personally experience and offer the world. Sometimes it takes years to find, but it’s there nonetheless. Just the fact that you will find your passion one day means that it already resides within you in this precise moment and that it has always been there. You just have to scrape away the layers surrounding it, disguising it, making you believe that you’re simply useless and will never be good at anything. Get rid of that self-critical talk. Remember, you are not this body and this mind only, you are the soul that’s shining the light of life into this marvelous human form. And a soul is naturally and instinctively creative. So who is your mind to tell you that you’re no good?

I don’t know what it is that’s causing this discomfort in me. It’s mild, and can easily be distracted, but it’s still there, persisting in the background, waiting for me to sense it. And I do. I pause and give myself the chance to feel, to truly feel this wind of unnamable energies floating in the sky of my being. Yet there’s nothing. I wait for the storm to strike and pass, but it’s a torturously impending cloud of doom.  So I write to-do lists and take my time to tick off every task, very often adding the next day’s tasks and getting them done too. I’m frantic but efficient, and I get lost in this immersion, yet the second I’m back to my senses, to the present moment, to my concoction of Self, I feel it all over again. The emptiness merged with discomfort. I find myself wishing for the days to pass like fleeting winds, like clumps of clouds, moving from one town to the next. Me, from one semester to the next, one year to the next, one self to the next. I am losing my life in time; it’s like I’m already dead. I don’t feel the fountains of Life rushing through me. I don’t feel the rivers of inspiration flowing in with every breath. I don’t remember the last time I felt the astonishment of a child, or the gratitude of a mother, or the wholeness of a saint. It’s like I’m not a real person anymore. Degraded from my sweet humanness and spiritual being-ness to the ego-driven acts of ticking off tasks and collecting grades and seeking the approval of professors and friends. I must find a way to come to life or else I would be dead and withered before arriving at my grave — and that would be a shame to this Life I have been gifted and all the good I’ve made out of it so far.