Rely on yourself. That's it.

I don’t understand how you can smile all day long but cry yourself to sleep at night. How pictures never change but the people in them do. How your best friend can become your worst enemy, or how strange it is when your worst enemy turns into your best friend. How forever turns into a few short months that you’d do almost anything to get back. How you can let go of something you once said you couldn’t live without. How even though you know something is best for you, it just hurts the same. How the people you once wanted to spend every second with you, think a few minutes of their time is too much to spare. How people make promises despite knowing how common it is for promises to be broken. How people can erase you from their lives just because it’s easier than working things out. How people become distant and wait for you to question why- so they feel more comfortable coming out with it because they are prompted to do so.

This is the thing...

When you hit your late 20's, everything begins to divide. You can see very clearly two kinds of people. On one side, people who have used their 20's to learn and grow, to find themselves, people who know what works and what doesn't, who have pushed through to become real live adults. Then there's the other kind, who are hanging onto college, or high school even, with all their might. They've stayed in jobs they hate, because they're too scared to get another one. They've stayed with men or women who are good but not great, because they don't want to be lonely. Their intentions are to develop intimate friendships, to stop drinking like life is one big frat party but instead they live an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than when they graduated.

Don't be like that.

Move. Travel. Take a class, take a risk. DO THINGS OTHER THAN DRINK AND WORK! Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either. Stop every once in a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal and ask some good questions like, "Am I proud of the life I'm living? What have I tried this month? Do people I spend time with give me life or do they make me feel small? Is there anything broken in my life that's keeping me from moving forward?"

Just whatever you do, don't get stuck in this downward spiral of self-pity and stagnant repetition. You're too wise for all that.

"So it goes."

"So it goes." Wise words, spoken by the one and only, Kurt Vonnegut. Meaning the dismissal of emotion—it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to."

Every now and then, I feel like I am swimming underwater. This is not a joke about living in a wet climate. Being depressed dulls things, makes me feel less, makes things look darker, makes food taste bland, makes things that usually bring happiness less satisfying somehow. I still look for those happier things. I still go through life and do my best to really live, and I have degrees of happiness within a more confined range of feelings. I just can't seem to connect the way I want to. Everything is muffled, limited, farther out of reach, insulated. It's very difficult to explain.

Then there are days where a little light comes on, and it's like I am surfacing; out from under the water and into the sun. Things are warm, touched with light, colorful and beautiful. Life becomes breathtaking. Love feels more piercing and exquisite. Food tastes unbelievable. Breathing brings satisfaction and just a look or a touch from someone else makes a connection. Those moments are what makes all the swimming underwater worth it. It's worth it just for the surfacing.