Life is full of great moments. Times when you laugh so hard, tears stream down your face. Times when you’re laughing so much that you don’t get a chance to breathe. When your heart feels light and refreshed as if it might never be broken again. Times when you’re doing the things you love with the people you love. These moments are the things that piece our life together. They let us know that, one day, everything will be okay. These moments make us fall in love with the idea of being free and alive. These are the moments we want to live for.

Although these moments are great, like everything else in our lives, they don’t last forever. When life sees our world finally filling with joy, it plays a cruel trick on us. These moments slip right through our fingers like sand and we’re unable to prevent them from blowing away by fate’s harsh wind. Happiness is slowly stolen from you and retrieving it seems impossible. To dodge all the obstacles life rapidly throws at you takes away all your energy and eventually you stop trying.  Something you thought you would finally get a chance to have forever is snatched right from your hands. Life has good and bad. Happy and sad. Nothing lasts forever. Not pain. Not happiness.

Life isn’t perfect and neither are we. All we can do is accept what is to happen to us. The sooner we accept this, the less we get hurt when are great days are unexpectedly flipped around to become the worst days we’ve ever lived and the more we become motivated by the thought that one day, our nightmares will finally become peaceful dreams. The knowledge that pain doesn’t last forever stays with us for the rest of our lives and gets us through what we were too weak to fight against. It motivates the mind to fight for what it believes is right. It inspires us to keep moving forward and only look back when we want to learn from past journeys. Life is full of great moments, we have to learn to be strong enough to fight for the moments we want to live in.

In my life I have been through many difficult situations that I thought would never end. I never believed my heart would ever feel complete and happy again. One example of this was at the beginning of grade nine. It was the beginning of high school and I had already started feeling an overload of stress and anxiety. All the friends I had in middle school had found new people to hang out with and I was completely alone. I would come home every day and I would never want to see the school again. Every morning I would wake up with a feeling of dread. This continued for a while and everyday seemed to get worse and worse. I hated everything about life at that point and I never thought I would feel happiness again.

By the end of grade nine, I didn’t want the summer to start. I had developed a deep love for school and even the weekends seemed to bore me. On the last day of school, I finally knew that nothing lasts forever. One day, everything will get better. I learnt that pain doesn’t stay forever and if I’m ever faced with a difficult situation, I can look back to my grade nine year because it was the year my life changed forever. My outlook on the world changed thanks to the help of new friends and new life experiences.