So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. I mean REALLY thinking. Throughout my entire life up until about 7-8 months ago, my outlook and method of success was based on the idea that other people will always let you down and you are the only person who you always will have. That theory didn’t exactly take the best care of me, and it led me down a road of pain and brokenness. By living my life thinking that I was the only one who I could trust, I grew farther and farther from my friends, and perhaps most importantly my family. Everything I did in my life was for me and my benefit. Other people, in my mind, just were there. Why did this not work? Simple, because the way that life works requires us to work with the people who are closest to us.

The healthy human mind craves and strives for relationships. I am a strong believer that the reason for this instinct is to make life easier to manage. As people experience good things, they can share this joy with the people around them. If people experience bad things, they should be able to rely on people around them to carry them through those rough times. This completely contradicts the idea that I lived by for so many years. 

Then I sat down and thought about why I felt the way I did, and why I practiced the isolationist methods that I did for so long. I guess that after a lot of the things that I’d been through I thought that people couldn’t be trusted with anything as important as someones well-being (for more info on that see my story). Honestly I think the way I was thinking at that point made me feel like the weight of the entire world was on my shoulders. My thinking was along the lines of “If they didn’t help before why would they help now? Why should I let myself get hurt by someone’s failure to act?”. So I kept it bottled up and tried to hold it in. It didn’t exactly get me anywhere positive. 

I don’t think that it was until after I returned home from boarding school that I really started to realize that maybe I could trust people around me. For so long I hadn’t given anyone the chance to help. Then I was put in a place where my only option was to accept help. I opened myself up to my family, and that made all the difference in the world. 

All in all, I’ve found that it’s absolutely detrimental to the human spirit to try to handle everything on your own. The people around you have been put in your life for a reason. Whatever your spiritual beliefs, even if you think it was just by chance, those people are who they are for a reason. I’m of the unwavering belief that everyone has their purpose. The people who surround you each have traits that can help you through a rough time, just as you can help the people around you. It’s a complex idea, but in my experience it’s an essential one to understand.

-Michael

livelifebyliving.com

That’s how a song by Nickelback goes. The interesting thing is that no matter how much everyone tries to talk about making a better world, very few people actually act on making a better world. I can’t tell you how many people I see every day claim to want to stop tearing people down, to stop bullying, to stop making other peoples’ lives miserable. Bottom line: people keep saying they want to make a change. Excuse my harshness, and stop saying something and just do it.

-Michael