The Journey and Its Meaning
“Maybe the journey is not so much about becoming anything. Maybe it is about un-becoming everything that is not really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.” (Anonymous)
This quote applies to a lot of different cases, and not everyone will view it in the same way that I have, but I think we all can agree with its inspirational undertone and the truth of the statement. One of the things that intrigues me is how most everyone who reads this quote will automatically think of “the journey” as life itself. I will not argue with this idea because life is a journey, full of joys and sorrows, love and hatred, content and war, but it is fascinating that almost every single person who has seen this quote came to the immediate and unconscious realization at some point in their existence that life is a journey that we all must traverse.
Going on in that vein, our journeys are made up of experiences, are they not? We all experience different things, from our formative childhood years to our headstrong adolescence to our oftentimes-resigned adulthood. These happenings change us, influence us, and not always in a way that is beneficial. Personally, I had a fairly good childhood, content for the first seven years of my life and happy with being an only child and having all of my parents’ attention to myself. After my baby brother was born I was still happy and not particularly jealous. Unfortunately, not long after that my mother had a stroke that paralyzed the entire left side of her body. There were weeks spent in the hospital and in physical therapy clinics, and my father still had to set out for work every day to pay for medical bills, so I mostly took care of my brother myself with the aid of whichever aunt and uncle we were staying with that day. Now, with my mother in a decent state of health and my father not needing to work overtime, I have gratefully slid into the role of the-older-sister-who-irritates-her-brother-but-still-loves-him-to-pieces with none the wiser, and all that I show from the ordeal is my vague dislike of the idea of having children.
Of course, with someone else, this experience may have revealed some hidden maternal affections, or even a deep-seated family rift, but the point of the matter is that it didn’t really affect who I am in the end. I know that I am only a teenager right now, and I probably don’t quite comprehend as much of the world as I will in the future, but if past experience is anything to go by, I will still have the same silly and sometimes-dark sense of humor, and the same distaste of wearing too much makeup (if at all), and the same love I hold for my family and friends. I have found, throughout my short fifteen years of life, that you do not have to be what your experiences make you. You only ever really need to be what you feel like you were meant to be.
Because you are amazing, even if you cannot see that yet.
