A/N: this was originally a diary entry, but I thought I discussed some interesting points so here you go :)

If I'm being honest with you, I don't know what to say. They say diaries are for writing down your thoughts but whenever I start an entry, I'm often doubting the accuracy of my own thought process to the point where I forget about writing anything at all. But I guess the whole point of writing a diary is that you express yourself freely without trying to reach a standard of writing or satisfy someone else's expectations of what a diary is supposed to consist of. So, here I go. 

Truth is, I'm a foolish human being just like any other and I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I've been confused as usual, but I've sort of come to a revelation about my problems – maybe the point of life isn't to know what anything means in the first place, but to embrace the limitations of existence and the human mind – embrace our stupidity. And with this understanding of one's own inevitable idiocy, one can strive to learn and grow as much as they can and to live as well as they know how to. Ultimately, I guess I'm the only one who can know anything about myself and my experience of living. I can't ask the rest of the universe or anybody else about a life they have never lived, isn't it? Because the only answer to why they can't answer me is obviously the fact that they don't see through my eyes, think with my mind, hear through my ears or sense anything through my senses to know the reality that this body perceives and lives in. So, if no one else knows the reality in which I live, how can anyone possibly answer the questions I have on it?

It seems I have naturally come to a conclusion and answered my own doubts without having to do any research or soul-searching, but by simply writing down my thoughts. It's quite miraculous how our minds work. It's quite miraculous how this mind and body is studying itself at this very moment. Our ability to take an objective view (well, an imaginary one which is of course biased towards how we perceive objectivity) of ourselves and deduce explanations for our own behaviour is really fascinating.

I have a fear of being stupid. I just realised. I keep using big words and worrying about my grammar and my sentence structure, but is there really a need to worry about such things? I mean, I'm the only one who is going to ever ber reading this again. Technically, I guess there is reason to worry about such things to a certain extent – clarity of thought helps in coming to conclusions more easily and moving from one thought to the next smoothly. When our mind's language is muddled and incoherent, I suppose we can end up struggling to even think at all. When I worry about my life, my future, my choices, my parents, my sister and the world around me and its horrors, I lose my calmness and intelligence to this overflow of thoughts which makes my head hurt to be honest. I lose my ability to think logically and confidently about what I'm going to do next or how I'm going to solve a problem.

Amidst my many worries and fears, something I worry about a lot is the suffering of others. I find myself conjuring up images of horrifying scenarios in my head because I fear the inevitable ignorance of humankind and the ignorance I see all around me in people I initially thought to be intelligent and all-knowing. In my head I see small children being abused and ill-treated with no one to turn to and people bleeding and bruised without anyone around to help them. I imagine people being shot and having to writhe in agony at the pain and I find myself wondering about how these people feel and what their lives are like. I find myself thinking of people who live in acute poverty, surrounded by their own filth, living each moment in pain from malnourishment, starvation, food poisoning, physical and emotional abuse and lack of hygiene. I imagine people with disorders like one I recently learnt about; cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder. I wonder how they feel, living each day suffering with a condition that never goes away – pain that doesn't go away. I also wonder about a person I know from instagram, she's an amazing artist, and she has lived through 4 open heart surgeries. She is constantly in pain and I can only try to imagine the pain she must feel each second of the day. I mean, a faulty heart? This organ is what keeps a person alive, it is responsible for the health of the entire body during each and every second of one's life. It's beating is what ensures the function of every other organ in your body. How does someone live with such a fault in their body? She talks about how the tissue in her heart is growing too much sometimes and I can't bear to think of how often the idea of death comes to her mind. I wonder if my heart will stop beating right now. It's hurting, maybe it's finally time or... will it hold on a bit longer? The constant pain, the constant reminder of her death creeping up on her...

I imagine so many terrifying things and I make myself feel guilty for being okay; for having a fully-functioning body, getting a perfectly copied set of chromosomes with no defective genes, having a family that works hard and loves me enough to keep me clothed, well-fed, clean and educated. There are so many experiences I have had, people I have met and places I have seen all because, sadly, I could afford it. My parents could afford to change schools like 6 times, they could afford to send me on school-trips, they could afford to get me new sports kits, uniforms, shoes, gear. I can't imagine a life without these opportunities because I was so blessed. And here I am, struggling to work hard in school because of my rampant thoughts and overflowing ideologies of life and the world around me. I am so grateful, I am, but it is because of how much I value this life and the opportunities I have yet to come, that I fear to waste it on something that I may not value. And I am currently struggling to value myself, so how am I to know how to use my time carefully when my time itself seems of little worth at times?

But when I suddenly find it in me to finally work on these things I so wish to work on in life, I start to doubt myself and hate myself. I start to doubt my intelligence, or my ability to even get something done. I start convincing myself of failure before I have even tried to succeed. And this comes from my secret need for perfection. I try my best to fool myself and everyone else that failure is not something I fear and that I am proud of it, but deep down, the truth of how I scrutinise my capabilities surfaces every time I try to do anything that intimidates me.

Still, how long will I spend my precious moments alive fearing my own mind and waiting for something outside of myself to miraculously save me from myself? How long will I sit around staring into space or the sky, wondering about what would happen if I got up and did something with this wonderful mind of mine? Because, the truth is, I know I am not stupid – or more accurately, I am capable of making something wonderful out of this existence. I am capable of making change in things people think can never be changed and I am capable of doing a lot of things that most of us often think are impossible. I am not as foolish as I take myself to be or others even take me to be. I am a genius in how I criticise my own thinking, force myself out of self-depreciation and urge myself to grow as a human being. It is truly a beautiful thing. And I don't want to live the rest of my life fearing things, whatever or whoever it may be. It is a waste to do that to this mind which I have been blessed with.

I also sometimes wonder, if I were someone who was as unfortunate as the people I imagine or think about, what would I want for myself?

Well, I would want myself to fight for my existence and my worth the same way I am doing now, as the person I am, sitting at this laptop typing away my thoughts and trying to make sense of the utter mess in my head. I would want myself to have hope, to believe in change and growth, and to see the world as more than just a place of suffering and ultimately, death. I would want myself to try my hardest to be grateful for what little I have and to treat these little things like giant gifts of existence – signs that I should keep fighting to grow and improve this existence.

I guess it is, in a way, healthy to think of the suffering of others we do not know of or have met. But I think one of the enemies of realistic perspective is media. Media presents things as more terrifying and more hopeless than they are in reality. They present certain people as weaker than they really are and others as stronger than they really are. They exaggerate the horrors of life as if there is nothing else to this world – just horror, suffering, cruel people and death. It is so unhealthy to watch the news, but a lot of people say it is needed and it keeps us safe. But does it really? I don't know – all I can imagine needing to watch the news for is to be aware of floods or possible earthquakes.

Speaking of natural disasters, those are another thing that terrifies me. I often imagine how it feels for those people who get caught in floods, tsunamis, avalanches, earthquakes and volcanic explosions. What does it feel like for those people who get trapped in the carnage, nearly or completely unable to breathe and in the darkness, bruised, maybe bleeding, maybe critically injured and in need of immediate medical treatment, gasping and grasping with their dirt-coated, bruised hands only to feel the rubble of man-made structures pressing down on their body? How do they keep hope alive in such a moment, such a place? How does it feel to have their mind go mad amidst the stress of the situation? Waiting in the darkness, sometimes for hours on end, maybe even days, wondering if they're already dead and they just don't know it, but the blinding pain telling them they're probably not?

And what about drowning? What does it feel like to be unable to breathe, keeping one's mouth tightly shut and squinting against the water as your lungs beg for air? And how painful it must be when your lungs finally give in and you suck in the water, your mind wishing so bad for it to be air, but the agony of the truth crushing all your hopes as the water fills your lungs and you suffocate to eventually die from the lack of oxygen? What does that even feel like? How terrified must they be, the moments before and during their drowning, their mind racing with the thought of certain, unavoidable death, yet still begging the world to save them by some miracle?

It scares me. The world and its horrors scare me, that's all. And my fears make me feel like avoiding anymore life just to save me from the potential suffering I might have to go through. Even still, death and its inexplicability, its uncertainty; that also scares me. All of it and all of life just seems so terrifying that I passionately fear the nature of anything and everything that is.

And people – that is another topic that bothers me a lot.

Why are people so strange in how they behave in this world? I sometimes wonder if my mother or father would ever think of murdering me. I mean, they have pinched my ear, slapped me and whipped me with a cane before – they don't seem bothered by the idea of causing me pain and how hurt I may feel when they do such things to me. My sister has kicked me before many times, she's scratched me, hit me with a glass bowl on my chest (this always bothered me significantly because I see her as one of the only people that truly ever cared about me, and for a moment I was convinced she actually didn't). 

I think about how they sometimes hurt me when I do things they don't like, and I fear that no one will ever truly care about me. I mean, when the people you love most don't think twice about hurting you just because you shouted back at them, even when you were only a small child, how can you believe in unconditional love? How can you believe they would protect you and care for you when they themselves are threats in your life? How can you be sure of anybody else, after such experiences? How can I believe in kindness in people when those who were supposed to be the kindest to me, were not entirely so? And even my friends, ever since a very young age, have not always been the supportive people I thought or imagined them to be. 

I had a best friend who bullied me and called me ugly – she made me draw someone ugly and told me I looked like her. This was when I was really young, but it always and still bothers me. Even my teachers have not been the caring and protective people I imagined them to be when I first met them. They're supposed to be the people that ensure justice in the classroom, but I still remember my sixth grade teacher mocking and laughing at me along with the rest of the class because I didn't know the capital of a country. Is that how teachers are supposed to treat students? My most recent experience with a teacher is my piano teacher who was a very old lady living alone. She punched me on the arm, pinched me, insulted me, degraded my playing and made me cry during three consecutive lessons before I stopped going. One time, when I made a mistake, she threw the book off of the piano and made me pick it up. She always slapped my hands away when I was playing wrong and she pinched me so hard it bruised for a few days – this was the last straw, so that was when I decided to stop. Her piano lessons were not worth this sort of abuse.

And you know what bothers me the most? My mum didn't have a problem with it. She wasn't upset with how my teacher was treating me, but rather she was more upset with my wish to quit. I had to talk to her for hours to explain to her how much this meant to me – quitting the lessons. Because going for them had had a very significant effect on my mental health which already wasn't doing so great, so I didn't want to continue whilst knowing I was allowing someone to bring me down and hurt me.

I don't like to think my mother doesn't care about me, but these little things that she does have always bothered me. And the little things people do in general to hurt others have always bothered me. It's also always bothered me when my own friends bring me down – people who I usually think are kind people before I see how they treat me in times of weakness.

I guess these experiences are exaggerated when looking at them through my perspective, because I don't think people intend to hurt others when they do these things. I probably was hurtful, the same way they were, to people in my life without actually meaning to hurt them. We become cruel and mean when we face cruelty from the world ourselves. It is our way of defending ourselves and protecting our own sense of self, and though it does not heal us, the façade of strength and confidence when others show weakness helps us cope with the weakness we ourselves feel at our core. After all, it is my expression of my true, honest self in both weakness and strength that threatens people, I think. I guess people have trouble believing in the good in the world – and this comes from fears like the ones I have of people around us. The fear that love really does not exist and, therefore, self-love and true self-expression also do not exist. I guess it is them trying to bring out the cruel in me so that they can live peacefully in their cruel reality without having to question it or fight for anything. I figure I am living proof of the existence of love, or at least was – my true self has been slightly tarnished by these fears I have learned through the years. I have become slightly less compassionate and forgiving, and I am hoping to return to myself by taking an objective view such as this and regularly analysing my own mind.

Well, that's all for now. I do have a life, don't worry.

I'd love to hear what you think of my ideas, so comment below any thoughts. Have a great day! :3