Nothing to Live For?
What gets me up in the morning when there’s nothing to live for? That is a question that I stopped thinking about long ago. When I wake up in the morning I think of all the little things in my life that I am grateful for or that I look forward to doing throughout the day. A few years ago, I would have said that the only reason I wake up is to move on to a different stage of my life. Well, that and that my mom would be sad if I didn’t. The last time I told my parents that I wanted to kill myself, they made me sit in front of them while the both of them were in tears and they lectured me on why I shouldn’t. That moment scared the shit out of me. It made me never want to tell them that ever again. It also made me think of the tears falling down their cheeks everytime I had those bad thoughts again.
Their tears weren’t what kept me going. What kept me going was something that my dad said through his tears, “There will be better days, but if you give up now you will never get to see them.”
It was something that my grandmother told me when we were baking together, “You know people always say that high school is the best few years of your life. I kept thinking to myself, if that’s true then I may as well die right now. I didn’t though and look where it got me. I have you.”
Now, I wake up every morning and I think about what the day will hold. It doesn’t matter that about 99.9% of the things that I think about never happen. What matters is that I am making plans for my future. Even if my future is just a couple of hours from now.
I used to wake up and think, It’s just a matter of time. Soon I will be dead and I won’t have to worry about life anymore. What a terrible way to wake up. It is a blessing to see the frost cover the branches of a tree. It is a blessing to hear somebody laugh their real laugh. It is a blessing to see somebody smile at the love of their life. It is a blessing to take a deep breath and smell that first day of spring. It is a blessing to to keep living. So keep living. Soon you’ll wake up and you will notice the small things and you will be so happy that you chose to stay alive to see them.