Go Look for the Light

Pro Tip: Surround yourself with people who make your heart happy.

I’ve come to the realization that pain and grief are inevitable. You will go through trials and hardships and they will be awful and gut wrenching and you’ll hate everything. Those will be the worst days of your life.

You will too beaten down and broken to reach far. It is in those seconds and hours, those days when everything is just too awful for words and you can hardly bear the action of breathing, that you will need good people desperately.

Not to suck the life out of them. Not because they’re going to fix you. But because in that blindingly awful time, you’ll need the beauty that they carry within their souls to help you remember that the ugliness isn’t all it was ever going to be.

They say that you take on the characteristics of those you’re closest to – I don’t have any proof for either proving or disproving this. But what I do know is that when you’re happy, things feel easier. Not because the world has changed but because you have. Because strength and energy are easier to find and because the weight of sadness has begun to morph into something not so crushing.

Full disclosure: I’ve had some really awful days. Some of those have been as a direct result of bad choices on my part. Some of them have been because of misunderstandings. Some of them have just been because, well, sometimes life is hard.

I don’t always understand the reasoning behind the hard times in my life and I’ve come to accept the fact that I don’t always need to. If there’s a lesson, it’ll come to me eventually. If there’s an overarching picture, it’ll be revealed. Dissecting why everything has/is or will be going wrong is just an exercise in futility.

But that’s not the point of this. The point is that you should surround yourself with people who make you grin and cackle and bring tears to your eyes with the depth of the love you have for them because life’s full of hard days. There’s no ridding yourself of them.

All you can do – all you can really do – is bear it. And it’ll be a whole lot easier if you’re not stuck in a hole all by yourself without a friendly face to at least shout encouragement while you dig yourself out of your mess.

These days, I have some truly excellent friends. These women are kick-ass and incredible and just so, so stunning that I just don’t even know what to do with myself sometimes. They’ve made me laugh, they’ve made me crazy, they’ve made me thank Allah for being blessed with having them.

My friends are beyond amazing. But I didn’t always have them. In fact, when I think back to the worst days of my life, I remember having some good people around me. But they weren’t mine. I liked them well enough. I admired a lot of them. But something held me apart. Our hearts didn’t connect, not really.

And that’s not because I’d never met an amazing person. No, I met some fantastic people because the world’s full of them – even if it doesn’t always feel like it. It was because I’d always kept myself aloof. We connected but it was just so brief.

Nowadays?

I feel free. I rant and rave and scream and shout and probably drive my friends all the way up the wall to sit in the light fixtures. I talk to them when I’m bored and I’m the first one to pick up a pitchfork when they tell me someone’s been hurting them.

Life’s still hard, a lot. There are days when bad things happen and I have to figure out how to deal with them. But you know what? I have these phenomenal people around me doing, well everything that people do and just shining.

And it’s beautiful. And it reminds me that there’s always gonna be a little crack of light in that hole and I just need to go looking for it.

So there you go. A 690 word love letter to my gorgeous friends and, just maybe, a reminder to you all – go looking for the good people. Because, I promise you, they still exist.