Feelings are flighty things, and even when the little voice inside is whispering: There's nothing you can do, so deal with it, there is absolutely nothing to keep us from being absolutely sure that the world is coming to an end. I'm not going to tell you it's not, because it wouldn't make a difference anyway. Instead, I thouroughly suggest you run to your bed (or the nearest private-ish place) and begin to cry, or scream, or write dark, angsty, tormented poetry in the shadows of the night. It helps. Trust me. I do it all the time. But please don't commit suicide. Chances are, what you're feeling will pass, and even if you feel like it right now, some of your other moods may not agree. I tend to change from mood to mood, and if I have a big decision to make, I wait a day or so until I've gone through all my different moods (I am a very impulsive person, and changing moods is standard procedure for me), and only then do I make a decision. I suggest you do the same. Express yourself in the way you must- even if you need a few hours or so to finish feeling awful. You'll feel better afterward.

There are those who will tell you you will never amount to anything. They sometimes do so harshly, the abuse of words, or indirectly, in the lonliness of neglect. And there are those who will put on a kind face, and say: "I'm only trying to help you." Those fatal words, those which dart like snakes and sting with the most pain. Those cruel lips which have kissed you and said kind things grow fangs and bite. You cannot cry; you cannot lose your face. Some tell you to continue on, that "This too, will pass." But if you cannot endure, you must fight. You must not let your spirit be crushed beneath a poison grove of barbed wire. You must fight back in the only way you can.

When you stop, you are not really stopping. You are just pausing. You are taking a break, even if whatever you're working on absolutely must be finished by tomorrow. And, want to know a secret? When you get worked up about something, freak out, and work like mad on it, things turn out about the same, or worse, than they do if you stay calm. (And people like you a lot more for not getting mad at them.) Chances are, whatever you're doing is not unsalvagable. When you stop, you are calming yourself down. When you stop, you are simply waiting for the right idea to come to you. When you stop, the world continues to turn- even if you can't feel it happen.

Think of how dry our lives would be without love! If you did not love your spouse, or your sister, or your friend, or your life, then truly, what reason would there be to live? We do not need to be told to love, yet we shy away from it, or hold back, to keep from experiencing everything. We sometimes say or do something that is not ourselves, to keep ourselves high in the opinions of those around us. But this is not love. This is acceptance, being deemed appropriate to another. We can only be loved when we are ourselves. To quote a well-known saying: "Those who matter, don't care, and those who care, don't matter."

In a way, we spend our lives changing; in a way, we spend our lives unchanged. If you face your true self, and you dislike what you find (which, if you have tried to the best of your abilities to be, you should not), then you have the power to change it. And when we become fully confident in who we are and are prepared for who we may become with the passing of time, we have found ourselves. We spend our lives becoming ourselves. This is not to say that once you find your identity, you find yourself. Your identitiy, your role, can be defined by society- you can be undefined by no one but yourself, and to be undefined, to have no limits, is far more important, for then you are a free bird soaring above the trapped souls who cannot imagine what they are missing.