Ellie P.
Photography by Olivia Karczewski
If you’re reading this, you will find it (again and again).
I struggle to stay unhappy. I know that’s annoying, and I would have found that annoying a few years ago, too. Throughout my adolescence, I yearned to be unhappy. A cinematic whirlwind of emotions hits you while in public, and no one picks up on it? Sign me up. Yet here I am, not relishing in those private moments of sadness anymore. Why? Because I found who I am.
College forced me to find myself. I’m talkative, energetic, and outgoing – three words that never went on my get-to-know-you worksheets in high school. While college has shown me who I am, I had to lose my newfound happiness to learn that I can find it, again and again.
There will come times when you doubt who you are, what you can do, and who you interact with. And there will be times when you doubt all three… in one semester. When that time came for me in the fall of my junior year of college, I had to learn how to deal with a pain that threatened to destroy my new emotional equilibrium.
On the night of my junior year move-in, I stared down a semester that all signs pointed to being the worst yet. Still, I stood in my new room and wrote on my mirror, “You Will Find It.”
Every morning, when the light poured into my room and forced me to take on another day, I looked to my mirror.
Pain is never continuous. The moments that serve as alleviation must prove that you will find it again because there it is, peeking in. I collected those moments, many of which contained my boisterous laugh, and added them to what I would call my best semester.
I’ve learned that life is a series of finding and losing. But whatever your “it” is, you will never lose it entirely. You will find it again.
Ellie P., West Chester University
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