Have you ever felt judged for no reason other than your facial features? Your skin tone? The clothes you wear or the way you act?
Have you ever felt this dark pit forming in your stomach that makes you hopeless and clutches at your heart—at who you are—and makes you believe nothing you do will ever be worth anything? That there is no reason to keep going?
Have you ever felt so full you burst, then immediately regret it, but because you can’t take back what you said, you keep regretting, never changing?
No matter your religion, ethnicity, or preferences, we’ve all been through hardships in our lives and will most probably keep going through them. These hardships, however, are not given to us as problems to make life harder, but as tests to make us stronger.
Swami Vivekananda’s words sum up God’s plans in his aesthetic poem:
When I asked God for strength, He gave me difficult situations to face
When I asked God for brain and brawn, He gave me puzzles in life to solve
When I asked God for happiness, He showed me some unhappy people
When I asked God for wealth, He showed me opportunities to work hard
When I asked God for peace, He showed me how to help others
God gave me nothing I wanted
He gave me everything I needed
But even with this knowledge, it is perfectly understandable if we still have a hard time coping with our inner demons. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all have our inner demons. It’s a basic human default.
A conversation in the 2016 Marvel movie Doctor Strange, lead to this fantastic quote from The Ancient One:
We never lose our demons,
we only learn to live above them.
And when you feel yourself trapped in a darkness where you can’t see anything, close your eyes, and remember. In the Qur’an, 13:28:
Verily, in the Remembrance of Allah do hearts find Peace
Faith and hope gives us this abstract belief that everything will end well without scientific statistics or probability. If it’s not going well, it’s not the end. Optimism in general shines light at the end of the dark tunnel, gives us something to look forward to and strive for. If you’re currently going through a rough patch, keep going. The patch is bound to end.
Everyone has their own ways of coping with the cards dealt to them by life, however, so not everyone will deal with their problems the same way as others. Some might take a month while others mere seconds. Some might be able to jump over obstacles effortlessly on their own while others need time and help.
Remember, it is never the end, even when it seems to be. Remember that whenever you feel your entire being at war with itself, we can get through it, that there is chance for peace, for peace is always within us, just sometimes it is obscured by the wars we face in life, and to find it, we need help, time, and patience.
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This is an essay I wrote to class that I wanted to share in this forum. Feel free to comment on what you thought of it, and give it a like.
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