As I Lay Dying...

A Letter to My Youth

(Cancer speaks)

Life will never go the way you plan. The unexpected will outweigh any kind of structure, and once you feel content, know that something is going to pull that rug from under you.

You will not succeed in your aspirations, yet, you will place the blame on your childhood and family members who held you back. The truth is, placing this blame is one of the things that will hold you back, but mostly, it will be you who holds you back. You will come up with excuse after excuse, and not take any responsibility for your lack of determination. You will, however, admit to your insecurities, even if you blame these insecurities on the psychological trauma of family and peers.

The main reason you will not succeed will be due to focus. Your focus will not be on attaining a stable and healthy professional life, but instead, attaining that perfect relationship - which will never happen. You will search and search, and you will find some that you believe will help you achieve, but, then you will find that belief has the tendency to fool you time and again.

In one of these relationships, you will acquire a disease that will force upon you stubbornness and stupidity as you travel through many stages of depression and denial. This denial will eventually come to pass as your physical health deteriorates - which won't be for a few years, but will come at a time where you wish it hadn't.

In the two relationships to follow, you will compromise your character and become someone that you're not, in order to please them. You will not only lose track of yourself, but will also lose track of the happiness you had always wished to attain. It will be in the latter of these two relationships that will end horribly, as you leave in order to find the you that you lost. You will question your capabilities of being human amd what it is to truly feel.

After finding the answers, you will finally find that perfect relationship - only to realise, in all its perfection, it is the most imperfect as things happen beyond your control. Life will get harder, all because you had given up on the independence and individuality that made you who you were. You will become selfless and give into things you never thought you would. You will love, truly, and in return, you will be hurt more than you have ever been. You will put you to the side, as you hold this love higher than anything else. This will create a dangerous situation as your health gets worse, before you realise that you should have been more cautious in taking care of yourself.

Once this happens, you will begin to question the relationship and all that it's worth. You will question him, his relevance to your life, and the strength of his devotion compared to yours. Throughout all of the torture, deceit, and lack of priority, you will realise that your love for him is the strongest you ever felt, and you will accept him for all his faults. This will be a love like you've never known, and in this love, you will come before many brick walls that will take all of your strength to knock down. Every time you knock one down, there will be a new one behind it. The more brick walls you knock down, the weaker you will become. Fatigue will set in, and you will come to terms with the perpetual obstacles that will never go away, no matter what you do.

You will finally know what true love is, but will never know what it is to be truly loved, as your expectations will always exceed acceptance.

You will make many mistakes. Some you will learn from, others you won't - and then there will be the mistakes you make where you will have to deal with the consequences for the rest of your life.