The article that feels like meditation.

This article is about how I talk to myself most of the time and how I talk to my friends when things get a little hard to get through in their lives as well—the story of how I got my thorns and wear them with pride.

Hope looks too pretty to hold onto sometimes, because of how we know beautiful things are meant to break if you love them too much. A misconception about “admiring from afar.” Thinking about hope is more freeing than actually hoping for something nice. Like every other thing, hoping requires consistency, too.

When you’re in pain, you hope to heal soon. And sometimes you confide in the people to comfort you and hold you through hoping. Someone out there is also going through a similar pain, but when they choose to comfort you, you carry their pain as your hope. It’s like they’re your answered prayer, and in order to get the remedy from them, you and they, both, are required to go through a certain kind of pain.

My point is, when things get hard in our lives and we are in despair, help appears through something. To have that help reach you, someone had to go through something, so they could tell you what heals the wound. And I think that’s an amazing way to carry the thorns of someone’s pain because their pain is where your cure came from.

And that’s very hopeful to me, that every hardship we go through isn’t entirely new, and there will always be someone who went through it before us. Their experience gives us our cure, and so does ours to the people who come next. Someone close to you is eager to carry your thorns with pride as a symbol of how strong you are, and that’s beautiful. That’s enough to hold onto each day, even if the days are tough to pass.

This shall too pass.