too fast.

maybe I'm not giving up. maybe I'm just staring over.
excuse my grammar and technical errors and poor writing style. i just wrote it.


as a child i spent a lot of time playing with my neighbor hannah. she was a couple years older than me, and i adored her. one day in particular we were rollerblading around our neighborhood and hannah, of course leading, decided to go down this big hill. being ahead of me, she reached the bottom when i was only about halfway down. it was then that a problem arose for me. more of an anxiety. the moment when i realized i was going much to fast, with no means to stop. i could have rode it out safely to the bottom like my counterpart, sure. but i didn't. i did what humans do in stressful situations, i panicked. with the thought of a little pebble or stone, perhaps a twig or abandoned bottle cap throwing my tiny wheels into a dizzying chaos, sending me tumbling into the harsh pavement, i thought it best to stop. although my skates were equipped with heel brakes, i found it much to risky to try and handle my decent while rocking back onto only one foot. leaping into the grass rushing past to my left seemed to be  the best and only option. ending my propulsion, into what was sure to be a gruesome death. oh how we dramatize events we cant handle... so with a wince and a little bit of false hope i jumped into the seemingly soft grass. grass that quickly turned into someones driveway, as i did not take my building momentum into account. i became scuffed and scratched, disheartened and dirty. what had i been thinking? trying to tackle a hill far beyond my preliminary rollerblading skills... 

and this concept has eerily followed me, and i’m sure many others, through life. just because we see someone else succeeding at a task, makes us think we can do  it to. because our mothers and fathers, teachers, pastors, friends and family, told us we can be whatever we want to be. because that’s how we get through life. trying to make things work out for ourselves. we want to be happy and to be accomplished. and we let our minds become overrun with ideas of what we want to be, what we think we should be. perhaps instead of what makes us happy. and now i’m just lost. between all the hours spent at work so i could by gas to power my car so that i could drive to ride horses. so that i could ride them and feel proud of something. so that i could have a purpose. so that i would have a reason to go to school. to go to college. to get a better job, to get a better car, and to buy more gas. to drive, to go and ride more horses, to feel better about myself when really all i feel is obligated. obligated to make myself happy with these things and i’m beginning to wonder if they ever really made me happy at all. 

because thats what happens when you do what people tell you to do. when you listen to your head and not your heart. you get lost and mixed up. and you end up in  a place you don’t want to be. that you never thought you would get to, because this was supposed to work. it worked for so many others. the cars and the hobbies, the schools and the dreams. but you’re left sitting there. wondering where you went wrong. and you don’t really know. and you’ll never know. because you listened to all the other people. and you cant get that time you wasted back. so when you’re sitting there, whether it be bloody and bruised on the pavement or alone and miserable in your car, and you realize this is not what you should be doing, even though you already did it. you scrape up you’re dignity or maybe you just sit there for awhile. but when you do get up you know what you have to do, where you have to go... 

i dropped out of my dream school because i hated it. i quit doing the things that made me happy because i hated them. i quit loving the people in my life, because i hated them. i had to stop everything. even if just for a second. because i was going so fast trying to do the things i saw other people doing. trying to keep up with the life i had been given, the one that my mother and father, teachers, pastors, friends and family might now think i’m taking for granted. because i stopped doing the things that made them happy. and i cant help thinking back to that day when i saw hannah flying down the hill. and it looked like fun. so i tried it, because that’s what i was supposed to do. but it wasn't. so i had to stop. stop for fear i might die. and as dramatic as that seems, we’ve all been there. because we didn't realize how fast we were going, and i really believe that often times we never really realize how fast we are going, until we try to stop.