Farewell, Seventeen.

So it's around midnight and I've gotten to thinking. My birthday is tomorrow, I'm going to be eighteen. I've been thinking about the past eighteen years and everything that's happened in even the past year. Unfortunately when I look back on the last year, the things that jump out the most are the bad things. I think of all the things that I had set out to do, all the promises I've broken, all the people I hurt, all the things I said I would never do that I did. And then i got to thinking, how did I get here? How did I get to the be the exact person I swore I'd never become? I have so many bad habits and heavy memories that I'm lugging around with me, and it's weighing me down. Well, no more. I'm realizing that I am not that person, I'm not who I was even yesterday. I'm not going to carry my past with me anymore. I am new, and I am redeemed.

But it can't be that simple, can it? I mean people are only human and we fall and if everyone has problems and bad memories, how can some people just let it go and be happy? How is it that some people succeed and some succumb? How is it that some people can just take a statement like 'everything happens for a reason' and just be satisfied. I'm not satisfied. I'm not content with fuzzy dull answers. I want to question everything, I want to get to the bottom of things. I want to be so sure that I am who I say I am, so much so that I can feel it in my heart. I want to be connected, to be passionate, to be on fire for everything.

This is the time, I suppose, to find out who we are in this world. Or maybe that's the thing. Maybe we're trying to hard to be a part of this world when we were never made to fit into this place. I don't really know. I feel fake. I feel as though I try to suppress who I am and how I feel in order to fit in to a group or a category or church or school. When really, I'm not too sure about anything. I don't know what I believe or how I feel or who I am.

All I know is that when I worship my God of the universe, everything melts away and i feel a fire inside of me, a passion. And then I'm satisfied.