I’m 19, and I’ve been extremely down on myself for most of my life. Every so often I’ll go through a nice phase where my head is clear and everything seems okay, but the hopelessness and self-sabotaging attitudes I carry with me are always there in the back of my mind. Even during phases where I can clearly see that everything in my life is perfectly fine and even wonderful, it’s hard to hold onto these warm feelings when I know how ephemeral they really are. In a way, I guess it scares me to feel happiness because I know it probably won’t last, no matter how much I want it to.

But I stay in that happiness as long as I can, understanding that without suffering, there is no happiness. Life itself equates to suffering, so those fleeting phases of happiness are all we really have to hold onto. While we suffer, we hold onto the hope that happiness will come again; And life has proven to me, time and time again, that come again it will. Those happy, warm moments are what makes life worth living.

Think about how lucky we are to even be human beings. I mean, we could’ve been born as literally anything else. I think it’s kind of a miracle that we have the intelligence to even worry about things like our emotions and the variations in our daily lives. Each human being is so special and unique, and each has something all their own to offer to the world, even if we don’t think so. Sure, we’re all suffering, but we’ve got each other. We are so much more connected and similar than we think, in everything we do and everything we feel. Human connections are so important because in the end, looking past all of the little things that make us different and unique, we are all the same species, and we all think alike for the most part. Empathy, openness, and compassion are the things that bind us all together, and we could really use more of it.

I’ve found that the main reason I’ve been suffering for most of my life is not even so much because of life or other people, but because of my own inner voice. There is no way to be happy in this life if you cannot offer yourself the same respect, love and compassion that you expect from other people. Once I began paying attention to my inner voice, I realized that the things I tell myself every day are incredibly cruel and unfair. You’ve got to treat yourself the same way you’d treat another person who’s made the same mistakes. Chances are, you’d be a lot more compassionate for someone who isn’t yourself. Once I realized this, I understood that there was nothing wrong with me. I’m just a human trying to be a good person and making mistakes along the way like everybody else, and that’s okay.

So if you’re constantly talking down to yourself and criticizing everything you do like I do, just remember how fucking important it is to offer yourself love and compassion, because unless you love yourself, you’ll end up a miserable shell of the person you want to become. We are ALL capable of becoming something more beautiful than we’d ever imagined, and doing things we’d always dreamed of doing. Hold onto those moments of bliss and warmth in your life, and never let them go, because they’re all us humans have besides each other. That’s the purpose of life, in my opinion; just to spread love and live freely. Don’t worry about what anybody else expects of you. Easier said than done, I know, but I’ve been working on it, and you can too. You’ve just got to believe you can. Take pride in yourself and everything you are, even if you don’t feel like much. None of us really are in the grand scheme of things, so just keep working to improve the lives of your fellow human beings, the planet, and yourself. No need to give up so soon when we’ll all die one day anyway, right?

Peace my dudes. Never give up on happiness, even if it seems far away.