What happened in the past is sometimes the worst thing to reflect on. I’m talking fucking cringe: me wearing a levitating Nike cap to the side like I knew what a G even was. It was what I wasn’t.

But that’s a part of being young I guess, conforming to popular opinion in the hopes that you will either blend into the background of invisibility or just simply appreciated for looking like an absolute Gangsta. But it’s horrible. I shiver from major internal humiliation at the thought of moments like that.

I think this has mostly to do with the fact that my life from that period forward has all been a matter of crisis management. Making myself a perfectly average, somewhat successful shell of a being so that people can just fuck off. Isn’t that what life’s about?

I wonder sometimes: does everyone have these cringe moments? Even the girls with lip fillers? It seems like the popular kids from high school never had embarrassing moments. Then again, they probably have weak dicks or knobby knees.

One can only hope.

It’s not the struggle that defines you, but I definitely think that it impacts how you view your success. Did you go through the shithole? Yes, we all did in our very own ways. That makes it that much more exciting when you succeed. Success is not written in our DNAs, that’s a major misconception. I suppose if you have access to financial resources and business connections, you have more access to getting your dreams fulfilled. But for most of us, it’s quite the levelled playing field.

A Life of Inevitable Cringe

But still, it’s difficult being in those moments. You can’t look back and think that things would be different. Because they wouldn’t have. How could your past self know how great your future self was going to be? It’s part of the mystery hoe.

Being stuck in a place where you feel that you’re not evolving is hard because you feel hopeless essentially. There’s no growth, just humiliation.

There was even a point at which I fell asleep with gum in my mouth and woke up with it in my hair. Long story short, I took a pair of scissors in the morning and cut the gum out. I looked as if I had hit my head on a vacuum essentially. My head looked deformed. This is just one humiliating thing that happened at school.

I guess my embarrassing life made me less considerate of what people thought. After all, I’m here at my computer typing away this shit.

Overcoming the Hurdles

The hurdles are hard to overcome. Simply put. They just are. They’re stored internally so you have to tell people to get help. But what if you can’t? What if they’re so hard for you to even come to terms with yourself? I think that’s how I felt. I’m slowly letting those barriers down today. But the shit I went through stuck with me for a while. It made me self-conscious about how I presented myself. I didn’t want to be seen; I just wanted to be let alone to live.

And this is probably why I wear whatever the fuck I want. Tapered pants, baggy pants, no pants. I do what I want. My family, of course, watches as I strut outside of our suburban home, but whatever, I’m fuckin’ me. Not like I’m fucking myself. I’m just SO ME. SO FUCKIN ME. There’s no need to hide me, my energy, my being, my thoughts. I am the truest form of myself...at this very moment.

Losing Faith and Losing Trust

It’s not to say that along the way; I didn’t lose trust in people. Oh, I definitely did. I needlessly cast myself in this very strange supporting role to allow the people I called my friends to treat me a second thought. They weren’t even to blame for all of this. I brought this upon myself. I would do whatever they needed, but I was just so quiet and private that I didn’t rely on anyone when it came to what I wanted. And that’s what I viewed myself as, so what was the issue?

It slowly became one years later when I found that all of these people I had thought were my closest people all kind of just washed away. The feeling of giving someone your all only to not receive that same fucking energy is so painful. It’s not the bloody, gushy wound type of painful. It’s watery tears, flashy sweat, and imploding sadness. I set myself up for this.

And my trust was even lost because I found that things I was telling these people were getting around. Yikes.

Finding Purpose

The struggle matters because it makes you passionate about where you’re headed. Not to say that you’re going to get whatever you want in life if you were bullied in school or faced adversity in any way. There’s definitely a lot of work involved. I think what got me through was that I had these hobbies I had always wanted to explore, and being at a place where I am financially secure, working a job that was made for me, and having great relationships with my friends and family has helped me commit to this further.

What I’m trying to say is more so that finding a purpose for the struggle is the perfect way to utilize pain for strength—using the heartaches from my teen years as fuel for powering my future. It works. From my experience, it’s not so much a motto or lifestyle; it’s a way of thinking.