Oblivion

I just finished reading John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and I can't help but sit back and feel like I've experienced a mindgasm. I mean, I know that I can be pretty deep and insightful at times (don't mind me, just stroking my ego a little bit), but after reading that book, John Green made me sound just about as deep as a kiddie pool. And you have to realize that, yes, it is the author who is deep. We often get so absorbed in the characters that we forget those characters only came to be because of the mind of a great writer. I feel like if I were to sit down with Green and have a cup of coffee at some hole in the wall cafe or a Starbucks, I would walk out of there 20x smarter than when I walked in. Yeah. It was that insightful.

The main characters in the book are diagnosed with cancer or have been diagnosed with cancer in the past, but what I loved about it was that it wasn't a book that gravitated around the disease. There were plenty of other small pieces to it that questioned and explored life, death, love, and how to deal with the whole spectrum of emotion, and throughout the entire thing, I could feel my mind exploding with in-depth thinking that kept peeling away layers and layers of thoughts about life that I had not even taken the time to really notice even existed. I can remember certain points in the book where I just stopped reading and pondered what Green was trying to get at or what he knew was there that needed to be revealed. Never before had I ever been introduced to such complex, insightful thoughts that seemed to dive into an ocean of their own, going deeper and deeper still until I found myself lost in thought.

What is death, anyway? And what is love? It has occurred to me that the more you love someone, the more apt you are to losing yourself once that person is gone. So when they're gone, where do you go? Where does that much of you just disappear to? I know that if I lost Shane, I wouldn't know how to deal with the pain. I could imagine myself lying on the couch in my basement in the dark, completely numb, ignoring the necessities of survival. And it makes me wonder just how much of ourselves we invest in other people. So many of us say we are living life for ourselves and that we can be happy by being ourselves. I've said before that I don't depend on other people because I can be happy all on my own. But that is also a lie. What are we without our relationships with other human beings? Sure, man himself could sit out in nature and enjoy all its beauties and riches, but if his happiness could survive on that, and that alone, then why did God create woman (so to speak in biblical terms)? If no one existed except me, myself, and I, sure, the pressures of meeting society's standards (or even a culture's standards, for that matter) wouldn't exist, which would make things a whole lot easier on my part. But how happy can we feel before our thoughts inevitably start to tangle and have no one there to help untangle them? We'd completely lose it. We simply cannot exist if we cannot find love and companionship in at least one other person.

John Green said in this book that pain demands to be felt, and I can't find any truer words than these. Pain demands to be felt. It carried weight when I read it, because so often, we try to mask pain. We cover it up and tuck it away so that we can save some face in front of people who care about us, because we love them, and we don't want them to feel pain. We create these facades so that we can go along in life not inflicting scars upon other people. But if we are not inflicting them on the people around us, we are only inflicting them on ourselves. Reading this book made me really question why we're so afraid to hurt. Love is hurt. We hurt because we love, and we love because we hurt. If we did not have anyone to love or to care for, we'd hurt from the pain of isolation and loneliness. But by loving others, we are risking the chance to hurt them for whatever reasons life decides to give us; things that we, ourselves, can't always control. There is no way to save face, in the long run, because if you hide it, you end up hurting. If you don't hide it, you end up hurting. But I think that love can overcome the pain just as much as it can cause it. If it hurts, it means it matters. And if it matters, then that means it's real. We question what love is all the time. We've been questioning it for God knows how long. We hear adults say we have no idea what it is, while we so deeply believe that we do.  And I think that to determine if it is real or not, you must know what it feels like for it to be taken away from you.

I understand that these thoughts of mine are most likely disorganized, because it is 4:50 a.m. and I have not chosen to go to bed yet. But I feel like these layers of thoughts are important ones, because not all of us take the time to recognize they are there, and we certainly don't take enough time to question them because we are afraid to feel them affect us in ways we do not wish to be affected. But the way I see it, if they make you feel something, whether it be happiness, sadness, anger, etc., then they must be thoughts that need to be addressed, correct? We are human beings that were created to feel. Again, speaking in biblical terms (although I find the bible to be a long history of telephone and hardly believe in half the shit it contains, no offense to any religious people), if our feelings didn't matter, then God never would have created woman. We need to feel in order to survive, which means that, yes, pain has to be felt and dealt with, just like any other emotion.

Hazel and Augustus (the main characters in The Fault in Our Stars) were well aware of life's cruelties, and knowing that they may end up hurting each other, they jumped into oblivion anyway, all for the chance that they may both end up happy so long as they were with each other. Life is about the risk, and about not knowing what will become of us, but being more than willing to sacrifice it all anyway for the sake of maybe coming across the kind of love and happiness that, even if experienced for just a second, is something real and extremely rare.

So many of us decide to walk on the sidewalk, but everyone knows there's more room for company in the street.

In My Eyes

Oh, how it saddens me to hear anyone say that they are unimportant; that they are ugly and worthless and boring. It saddens me to hear them say that they don't care about anything anymore, and that they've given up. It hurts to watch them point out the most beautiful mistakes on their bodies, and to call those things ugly and unimportant; to wish that they could change it so that they are flawless and perfect. Who has ever wanted perfect? What good is perfect for anyone? If one of us is perfect, the rest of us stand in the background and brood in our own jealousy, anger, and resentment of ourselves and our imperfections. We are inferior to perfect, and therefore, must achieve perfect to feel like we are no longer inferior to those around us who seem to have found a happy medium, who really aren't happy because they keep finding things to hate about themselves, and therefore, are not perfect.

I will tell each and every one of you right now that perfect isn't possible, and if it were possible, then life would be utterly boring and terribly dreadful. What is there to challenge if we are good at everything? If  we have nothing to work with or have fun with? And why in the hell are you feeling terrible about the shape of your nose or the color of your eyes, or even the thickness or thinness of your lips? Why are you beating yourself up over having a stomach when a stomach is supposed to be a part of the body? Why do we obsess over our hair and how it's too frizzy or poofy or flat or whatever your hair is? Why are we picking on ourselves and hating ourselves, and if we cannot love ourselves, how can we possibly love anyone else? If we're always living in someone else's shadow of perfection, than how can we, as humans, possibly be happy? To constantly be picking on ourselves is to constantly discourage others because we cannot be happy with the way we are. And if we aren't happy with the way we are, who is going to want to love us if they must live in fear of us seeing them as we see ourselves, picking at things that are different, odd, weird, but overall, wonderful about ourselves?

I grew up wondering what was wrong with me, and why I couldn't be happy. I constantly asked myself if I had the right looks and if I acted the right way. Then, one day, I woke up, and it occurred to me that I had been going about things all wrong. It did not matter if I had a thousand friends, or one. And it did not matter whether I had a boyfriend or not. It didn't matter if I had the power to capture a whole audience, or just one person's attention. The important thing was that I needed to accept who I was, and to do that, I had to explore who I was. Exploring my interior and my exterior made me realize that I loved my big feet. They were big, but they were healthy and beautiful. I had gigantic hands, but wonderful words came from the way I wrote with them. I gave birth to drawings and baked goods, and my hands were big enough to hold someone else's hands when they needed to find the comforting touch of someone they loved and cared about. I used to not like my eyes, and then one day I fell in love with the color variation and how I could manipulate it with eye makeup. My poofy, wavy hair was thick and full, and I could do so much with it concerning new hair styles. I hated my body and my stomach until I was able to find ways to show my curves without being embarrassed by them, and once I found the right fit, I loved my body just the way it was. And all of these aspects are things that I still love about myself very dearly. I realized my mistakes were things that someone else could easily love about me because they were a part of my individuality and who I was.

At one point, I believed that I led a boring life, and that there was nothing to contribute. I was a waste of space that no one really even cared about. But I decided that I was boring because I wasn't living, and without living, I couldn't develop my own thoughts and opinions and personal views about life. So I stopped being boring and took interest in things that I found curious or out of the ordinary. I began to educate myself by visiting internet sources and reading books and surrounding myself with people who loved to talk about life and love and academics. I began to watch the world in a different way, and I realized that I hadn't been thinking or seeing clearly. My happiness was solely dependent upon me. With that in mind, I sought out good friends and learned from bad ones. I learned lessons through disappointment and a long history of always losing and never winning. And if there was ever an instance where I did win at something, even if it was small, I took notes in my mind on what I did right and went from there. Eventually I got to a place of self-satisfaction, and now that I am happy with myself and my accomplishments, body image, thoughts, and effort to make this world, these people, and myself better, I strive to keep loving everything I used to hate. I strive to love myself internally and externally, and ultimately, it has only become an advantage that I never used to have. People can love me for who I am because I love myself, and if I can love who I am, mistakes and all, then I can love you for all that you are too.

So child, friend, acquaintance, stranger... please don't hate yourself for who you are. Please don't pick on the things that you think are wrong with you, because I find the things that you think are mistakes, and I fall in love with those things because they make up the uniqueness of who you are. Do not beat yourself up over the things you have done wrong, or the failures you have experienced. Don't tell yourself that you are ugly, unimportant, and worthless. Don't question how anyone could possibly love you because you're not happy with the way you see yourself. Look at your imperfections. Look at all of them. Make note of them, and focus on them, because even though you may not like these things, you have them for reasons no one else does, and that's kind of cool. Those imperfections are important. Don't hate them. Love your mistakes and cradle them in your arms, because great things are going to become of them. They have the power to change, to influence, and to make your life worth more than you could ever imagine it to be. Not only that, but once you love yourself, other people will love you too, because they'll know that if you can love your flaws, then you can love theirs, too. If we aren't focusing on perfection, and instead, on loving what is naturally given to us, then we can all achieve what we're striving to be: accepted.

Darling, when you beat yourself up over the things that make you beautiful, it makes me very sad inside, because you are so much more than you give yourself credit for, and I wish you could see just how amazing you are in my eyes.