When You Fall

Based on evidence of faded stitch scars, scraped elbows and mildly calloused hands, I guess one can say that I fall pretty frequently. Sometimes I trip, whether it be over my own feet (yeah, it happens) or something on the sidewalk. Other times I lose my balance or run so quickly across the street to the point where I can no longer control my legs.


Despite the slight amount of blood and/or the stinging pain on whatever body part is injured at the moment, I have simply learned to stand up as fast as my strength allows and keep going onward. I normally don't stop to answer bystander's questions or even acknowledge what happened. I just keep going. And in the past six or seven years, it has become almost pure instinct.


And it makes me wonder as to why on earth it can be pure physical instinct, but not pure emotional instinct.


In other words, why is it easy for me to get up off the sidewalk, but difficult to climb out of emotional pitfalls?


Last weekend, I decided to take another shot at something I had tried this past August/September. Initially, I was incredibly nervous, but felt more confident as the night went on; I looked good and felt like everything was going well. I had to have some sort of chance at this, right?


I received a call later on saying that I could not be placed anywhere due to my current GPA (or at least where my GPA stood at the end of the first semester). I took the news as calmly as I possibly could in front of my friends, but inside felt like an erupting valcano. Here I had gone through the process for a second time, only to have it be all for nothing?!


It wasn't as much wanting to go back and change the past as it was wondering where exactly I would go from that point on. 


And it definitely wasn't the first time I'd been "kicked down" so to speak, in college. As much I wish it was, it probably won't be the last time either. 


The comforting thing is knowing that everybody goes through it; we all may have different experiences, but we all essentially feel the same things when it happens. You feel like you're not good enough and that in a sense, you probably don't deserve what you were pursuing. You feel like you could have tried harder or done something more to make it happen. You once felt like you could take on the world but not find yourself nearly being squashed by it. 


When I first began to write this, I never understood why it was so easy to do one thing and not the other. But I've realized in regards to physical vs. emotional pain, the physical tends to fade faster than the emotional. Why? because we have the memories. 


But that doesn't mean that one should sit there and brood over it; at one point or another, you have to go on with life. 


I've learned that sometimes it's good not to necessarily have a plan; to take it day by day and be open to whatever opportunity comes next. You experience more growth and maturity when you're not constantly trying to force things to fit together in a certain way. 


The biggest lesson? That obstacles don't come about just to keep you from something; they're there to help you determine just how badly you want it, and whether or not you'll do whatever it takes to get around it.