How many times have you stopped in the middle of a difficult task and thought to yourself “I can’t do this,” and then some small voice tells you to keep trying. The times that I have experienced this and followed through, I always find that I am more capable than I give myself credit for. When your back is up against the wall you find out who you really are. In that moment you can’t allow yourself to listen to outside sources. Other people might look at you and tell you “you’re not good enough, just quit,” or some might take the opposite view and say “you’ve done enough, it’s okay to stop there.” I believe that if you find the will within yourself to carry on you will always be surprised at the distance you can actually go.
I don’t know what your past is. I don’t know what you have been through or how hard it was but I do know this- you survived it all. You’re still here. Think about how much further you could go. I bet it’s further than you could ever dream.
When you decide to give up on yourself, you are not only robbing yourself of the future that you were born to have but also the people around you that would come to rely on you. You rob the people that would have looked to you for inspiration and direction. When you grow, the whole world grows with you.
There have been plenty of times when I thought that my life was over. Times when I thought that I reached the end of my personal rope and would never be able to find a way to move forward. But I did. And you will too. I’m not saying that it will be easy, because it won’t. It might be the hardest thing you ever do just to hold onto hope while you work to make things better.
Hope is a hard thing to hold and can be so easy to let go. I don’t want you to think about the hope in your life as something that you have to hold on to, instead I want you to think of hope as something you are fighting for. Without hope, the future is blurry and unspecified. You’re decisions become aimless and random as you fight to find a glimmer of light through the cracks. This is why you fight for hope. When you find that light, don’t you dare let go. You owe it to yourself and more importantly- you owe it to the world to never give up on yourself.
It all starts with you.
