Introduction:

This blog is coming from the deepest reaches of my soul and is what I long to tell this generation in which I live.  I have set it up anonymously, so that no one will be hurt by examples that I give to validate some of the points I make within my posts and all names will be changed.  I do, however, hope that some of this advice will make its way towards those who need it.  I will tell you that I am in my early 20’s, a Christian, have graduated with a bachelor’s, and am a self-driven, middle-class person with a great many dreams.  So you can understand the way I feel as I do, I would like to give you a little background on my life up until this point, and by a little, I mean as briefly as possible.  There are many more parts of my story that will come up later, but these pieces are relevant to how I would like to begin this blog.  This blog, I hope, will help others like me see past some of the stupidity they face every day and maybe even wake some others up.  It will also address what I believe to be a generation of people who have lost the ability to think and do things for themselves, only living to feel good in the moment.  If you just wish to get to the point of this whole post, you can skip to the bottom of the article.

Background:

I want to rewind quite a bit, so you can get the big picture.  High school is really where my outlook on life really began to unfold.  As I made my way though high school, I was a fairly popular person, but by no means the most popular.  I wasn’t the class clown, or the star athlete, or person taking the most AP classes hoping to be the next valedictorian, but I was a happy-go-lucky person.  And most of the time, I was just that, a very lucky person.  My best friends were talented and intelligent people.  Most, more intelligent than I, but I was blessed with the attribute of common sense and made use of it quite often.  Common sense allowed me to be a quick thinker and a cunning one at that, I learned to trust my gut.  I could fake my way through almost any test and all my teachers loved me, even the ones I disliked.  Multiple “guess” was my favorite type of test, because it was like a game that I could always win.  I never had to study much in order to receive good grades.  I was just the kind of person that everyone seemed to get along with on a daily basis.

This all changed the day one of my favorite teachers from a class I had taken a couple years previously, decided that I was a prime candidate to date her daughter, who was also in my grade.  Heck, I liked the teacher and I was friends with her daughter, so I didn’t want to disappoint either one of them.  I took the daughter out a couple of times (the movies) and even went over to her house for dinner.  She was nice enough, but I just knew in my gut that it wasn’t right, so I told her that it just wasn’t going to work out.  Now high school girls are just about one of the meanest creatures to ever walk the face of the earth, as some of you have probably already experienced, and this one made it her personal goal to destroy the person who had so quickly rejected her.  To make an even longer story short, rumors were spread and my name was dragged through the mud.  Her mother and father (her father also taught at the school) now both hated me for hurting their oh-so-precious angel of a daughter.  As the semester progressed, to get back at me, she decided that she would try to seduce one of my best friends whom I had known since grade school.  Let’s just call him Moe.  This turned out to be a good idea on her part, because it worked.  I did my best to save Moe from the witch that I had so unwillingly discovered, but to no avail.  She fed him the same lies that she fed her parents, and consequently, successfully turned one of my best friends against me.  I was pretty upset over the whole ordeal, not so much over losing a friend to hang out with, but over the fact that he had taken her word over mine.  After I had a heart to heart with my blinded, love-struck fellow teenager, I finally came to grips with the situation and decided there wasn’t much I could do about the whole thing, and life went on.  My friend group was wounded, but not broken, and I still carried on in my almost-as-likable state.

Now, I dated multiple other girls, some younger and some older, but nothing was super serious until my senior year.  A new girl moved to town and was new in school.  I made friends with her, and next thing I knew I was asking her out.  We had the same interests, same values, lifestyles, and she was pretty, or so I thought.  I’ll come to that in a minute though, at this point in time, I was living off the aroma of love and nothing else in the world mattered.  The relationship went on for almost 3 years.  In that time, you would think you could learn a lot about a person; well that is where you would be wrong.  We were well into our second year of college at the same school when I could see our lives headed in different directions.  My gut feeling told me that I needed to get out of the relationship before it went any further.  It was a hard thing to decide on after being with someone for 3 years, but I knew that it was the right thing to do.  Being a compassionate young man, I wanted to break it off easy, because I did care for her and didn’t want to hurt her.  But hurt is inevitable when it comes to broken relationships.  Finally I mustered up the courage to bring it up and we discussed not seeing each other anymore.  There was lots of crying, as you would expect, but I reminded her that if we were really supposed to be together, then we would.  Feeling satisfied I had done the right thing I tried to move on.

After dating someone for 3 years, you will find that the group of people that you hang out with has probably severely diminished.  I had approximately three good friends that I hung out with on a regular basis outside of school.  We can call them Larry, Curly, and Tony.  Larry had practically lived with my family for a while, and even gone on some vacations with us, so we were really pretty close.  He was away at another school, be we still remained close, and he came home quite often.  Out of the three, I would usually hang out with Tony separately from the other two, because they weren’t as good of friends with each other as each one was with me.  I began to make friends with people in my classes that I was actually interested in hanging out with aside from just being classmate acquaintances.  One of these people happened to be a girl, and she was a real down-to-earth person that was fun to be around.  One day after class, a couple weeks after I had broken off my relationship, I asked her if she would like to grab a bite to eat with me and my friend Tony.  As it happened, she said she would like to go eat and we met her at a restaurant for dinner.  As we were finishing eating, I got another one of those feelings in my gut like something bad was about to happen.  I looked at Tony and mentioned that it was about time to head out, and right as the words finished leaving my mouth, my ex girlfriend walked through the door to the restaurant with Curly’s then girlfriend.  You can probably already imagine the chaos that ensued.  But again, to make an even longer story short, my newfound friend and I were cussed out in front of many people for something that we didn’t do.  It was probably the largest scene I have ever been party to in my whole life to date.  Rash and nasty phone calls from my ex and her parents soon followed, along with wanting every item she had ever given to me back (p.s. I left the junk on the porch and told her she could pick it up if she wanted it).  She also accused me of cheating on her with my new friend for 4 months prior to us breaking up, and that time length kept growing every time I heard the story from someone.  Speaking of stories, to make matters worse, immediately following the biggest scene of my life, she made an effort to contact everyone we both knew to let them in all the details of just how big of a jerk I was now.  She made the call to my friend Larry before I could even tell him the about being being blatantly cussed out in a very public place, which was kind of big news.  Larry waited until the end of my account of the whole situation to tell me that he didn’t believe me and that my ex had called to let him in on the “real” story.  A couple days later, Curly delivered me a letter that had carefully written, which had the audacity to state how wrong I was for treating my ex girlfriend so wrongly.  My ex began to stalk my house, drink liberally just to get drunk (something she had never done), and she would make love to just about anyone who was game (which was just about everyone she came across), I found out later.  My new friend from class thought the whole thing was rather crazy, and we stayed friends, but were never anything more at any point in our affiliation.  You’ll kind of just have to take my word for it though, because I’m an anonymous entity and everything on the Internet is true!  But if you don’t, I don’t really blame you or care quite frankly, because it seemed that no one else appeared to believe me either, except for Tony.  And he had a front row seat.

The funny part of the situation was that I had been there before.  Slowly, over the course of this whole time period, I was changing from a happy-go-lucky person to a realist.  My friends, who I thought had my back, had thrown me under a bus and left me lying in the street to die.  To make things even more interesting, I found out a month or so later, that Larry had decided it was a good idea to date my ex.  After all, she was a poor, hurting, wounded soul and she needed someone there to comfort her in this trying time.  It seemed to hurt even worse this time; because I’m not really the type of person that lets much get to me and this had broken me down.  It’s a hard thing to tell people the truth and only have a few of them accept it.  I mean these were my best friends who were unashamedly telling me that they believed the tales of a girl they knew only through me over my word.  I hadn’t ever lied to them before, so what reason would I have to do it now?  The situation really didn’t even involve them in the first place.  I just could not understand why they did something I would never dream of doing to them in a million years.

It was at this point in my life that I was able to step back from the situation.  I learned how to view the situation from a larger perspective, and that perspective was my life in it’s entirety.  I no longer just looked at what was going on in that instant, but also what would be happening years down the road.  I had always been a dreamer and looked at the big picture, but I was able to now look at my life in the same way.  In the big scheme of things, this incident was just a blip on the timeline.  The truth will always become evident, because one can only hide it for so long.  It wasn’t worth the time and effort to worry about what I could not change.  So, I just decided to put the matter aside, because I finally realized how petty the whole thing was completely.  I then thought back to high school and realized that I wasn’t upset about that incident anymore either.  I decided to message Moe on Facebook and I told him how foolish I had been to let something so little come in the way of our friendship, and wouldn’t you know it, he was sorry too.  You’ll be happy to know Moe had broken up with his psycho girlfriend by this time, and that we became friends again.

Eventually Larry and Curly came around as well.  They both finally saw my ex for the person that she was truly, the person with whom I was so thankful that I didn’t choose to spend the rest of my life.  Both Larry and Curly apologized to me for their foolishness, and I accepted their apologies, but I would never trust them with any information I really valued ever again.  I had learned a valuable lesson, and that was that I would never fully trust someone again.  I realized then, that the truth does indeed come out, no matter how long it may take.

The Point:

The whole point of this post is to tell you that you are your own best friend.  You don’t need others to validate who you are and why you do what you do, but make sure to think before you do or speak.  I know now to look out for number one.  There’s a reason that the saying “If you want something done right, then do it yourself.” holds true.  You can’t put your trust in people, because they will let you down every time.  Schools and organizations like to encourage individuality, but when people decide to think outside the box, they are chastised for not being like the others.  For some reason peer pressure is still a factor that rules so many people’s lives.  Well I say screw what other people think, if you are going to do something, then do it for yourself.  Don’t strive for good grades because your parents want you to achieve them, get them because you want to go somewhere in life.  Do what you love.  No one is helpless, and everyone has an equal chance at life.  If you don’t like the situation you are in, then change it.  No one is holding you back but yourself.

It took me years to figure out that people aren’t who they say they are, even if they believe it wholeheartedly themselves.  Trust yourself where others can’t be trusted.  The one thing that all of these gentlemen in these examples had in common was that they were “nice guys,” and they hadn’t dated many, if any, girls up until these described.  There is no way by just being around another person that you simply like for a short time can tell you that they are the person with whom you need to spend the rest of your life.  Don’t be sucked into something that you think you can’t get out of, because there is always a choice.  Don’t compromise who you are just so you can make something work, because so-in-so is the “one.”  How can you honestly say that a person is the one when they are just the first person you came across that would actually give you the time of day?  Branch out and meet some more people.  Figure out who the person you think is the “one,” is really.  Don’t wait to figure it out down the road after it is too late.  Curly is now married to a girl he started dating very early in high school and Larry is in a mess worse than he was before with my ex, but that is an example for another post…

People are fickle creatures and ultimately make dumb decisions that cause others to question what they were even thinking.  So many are just caught up in living for the moment.  They can’t see the big picture because they are so focused on the small things that are happening now.  I encourage you to take a step back for your immediate circumstances and look into the future.  Ponder where you want to be and focus on that.  In a very short time, where you were will just be a memory.  Thinkers are the future of this generation, but who they will be is the better question.  A few can sway the majority, if the majority can’t think for themselves.  Conformists will then make up the majority and will push the agenda of a few thinkers that don’t have the best intentions in mind.  Don’t ever let someone tell you that something is impossible.  Dream a dream and don’t let someone else’s opinion change that.