You’re always going to feel it. It’s a never-ending gnaw at your will to live. As if you’ve lost grip on the rope of life, of all the twines of your journey that pulled you through the tragedies and the endless heartache. You feel as though your rope has snapped, as though something has chewed it thin until your left hanging from the strings of God, the ultimate puppeteer, and fighting for your life.

With all your might you try to climb back up to the top of that mountain to reach your ambitions, but instead you feel like you’ve cascaded towards the Earth.

You lose the motivation to climb back up, your frayed rope hangs above you with the sort of nostalgia you can’t shake, as if it’s laughing in your face and telling you that you aren’t at all brave. You aren’t strong.

Instead, you have to push past the feeling that you’re losing control — that others are racing past you in the sprint race to happiness. It’s all in your head, it’s all floating about that brain of yours that tells you you’re a failure. You didn’t pass that exam. You’re unloved. You don’t meet the standards of our still patriarchal society.

The only way to fully live in life is if you put in the same amount of effort that you wish life to give back to you. It’s a pull and push motion. God pulls our strings and calls us the actors of our own lives, with our every action and word presented in the movie that our narratives follow, our fate forever lingering about God’s manipulative hands. Our only job is to see where the wind takes us, where our life ends up without tampering with fate or destiny.

Nothing matters as much as you think it does, in reality everyone has good and bad days, and to ride the waves of this treacherous life you should cling on to the only thing that’ll save you: kindness, compassion and friendship.

Although a rope can never be unbroken, if you get on that stepladder, tie a new rope to the one you once had, and turn a new chapter in your life, you’ve reached the sort of person I’ve always wished to be. The sort of person that moves on with their life without completely relinquishing the chapters they once battled through, or the ones surrounding love that they wished to forget.

Strength is the foundation of our lives, the foundation of the ropes and strings of God. When our rope breaks, we feel defeated. But you can’t stay staring up at the distraught snapped rope all your life. Snatch it, control it. Reach the top of your climb and achieve goals no one has before, because this I feel is the real purpose of living.

No one has yet understood why we’re on this Earth, but it’s your chance to make use of the beautiful world we live in, and be free. This is the balance of life, and it should never be forgotten, not when we live on a sphere of water and land in a universe larger than we can comprehend.

Keep pushing past the feelings of self-doubt. I promise you, they aren’t worthy of your time.