Sinking Sands

There comes a time in everyones life where you feel like you may just lose your grip on reality. Perhaps you have lost a loved one. Or gone through a break up. Or unhappiness in your job is suffocating you. I am in that space right now. I feel utterly overwhelmed by college work. But I guess I wasn't prepared for the hard work and many hours that it takes to achieve a degree. I was thinking to myself, why on earth do I even want this degree, why am I spending three years of my life, learning things I won't even remember three minutes after writing the exams? And the truth is not because I want a fancy job or because my parents forced me to. It's because out of all the people that I could prove things to, the person I want to prove it to the most... Is me. I need to show myself what I am capable of, what I can accomplish if I set my mind to it. Because I am certain that my parents believe in me. But I can't be sure how much I believe in myself, until I have proved it to myself, by making a decision, carrying it through, sticking it out, and then knowing it was completed and I made it a success.

I can use that knowledge to better myself. And I did it all by myself. I need to know that, so that I can continue the rest of my life knowing that I did, and therefore I can.

It is not the degree that I need, to close this void in my mind, it is the effort I need to make, the achievement I need to conquer. That will fill my heart with the feeling I need to confidently believe in myself forever more. And in times like these, when I am feeling so low and inferior to the thousands of pages that lie before me, (fine, I may have exaggerated slightly on the number) I remind myself that this is the reason I will make it through the next few hours, days, months and years. Because when I walk free after graduation day, I will be the first in my family to receive a degree. And I would have proved to myself, that the long walk was worth it.

Eventually, you rise up, and when you look back you can see that you weren't standing in sinking sand after all. You were just floating above it.