One average A Day, I walked into my Advanced Speech class alongside the rest of my classmates. I went to turn something into the average basket over there that each of us knew all too well. But my eyes caught a glimpse of something I’d never noticed before: a wad of worded magnets stuck to this file cabinet. I expected an average phrase, an average sentence, or an average motivational quote.
But they read, “I dream of a perilous death of my discontent winter.”

I became who I am today because of two months shy of 14. I remember that day, that year, that ever-so discontent winter like it’s a burning iron imprinted into my brain. It was the day I came home from school, called 9-1-1, and later that night, heard the wad of words “she’s gone” creep out of the creases of my dad’s mouth as he fell to the ground. I remember that day after, too. There was a fresh layer of snow, which wasn’t there the night before. My world had gone white, as if I turned the page of my favorite book, and there were no more words left: just a blank block of book. Nothing was as it had been. I wallowed in self pity with every “but you’re so young,” “why you,” “how could God do this to you.” That’s until two months into the awestruck aftermath, when someone sent me a birthday card saying not only the usual yearly wishes, but also, “Don’t ask for a lighter load, but a stronger back.”

As the world tends to do, I’ve seen it tear people apart, including myself, and those living under the same roof. But I saw other people’s mothers died or brothers died, whether it was accident, cancerous, or anything in between in this jumbled mess we call death. As Alice Sebold had said in her book The Lovely Bones, “Horror on Earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or the sun, it cannot be contained.” I realized horror occurred, but why so often? Why does it happen everyday? Why to those people? And why, why, why, can’t we do anything to prevent it?

I began to pity others despite myself at this point. I realized the pain was universal, not strictly internal. I remember my grandpa sat me on his knee when I was nine and told me, “Jennifer, you’ve always gotta find that bit of good in the bad.” Slowly but surely, I’ve come to realize we all should find that bit of good in the bad, especially for the sake of those around us. We need high hopes, not easier situations. The big man upstairs, or whatever’s steering the course of our destiny, tends to give us one and not the other, if we’re wise enough to ask for the right one. “Don’t ask for a lighter load, but a stronger back.”

Each and every one of us has a story, whether it’s a sob story or our favorite lifelong lived book. But those stories, those memories, those traumatic experiences weren’t given to just anyone. They were given to the people who can handle them. Maybe someone’s pain seems harsher than the pain you endure. But in the end, all pain is pain, isn’t it? “We’re all to meet the same destiny; we all have the same sized graves,” says an old English Proverb. What good would asking for a different or easier situation do in the long run? This pain may seem insane, yes, but this pain isn’t pointless. This pain may seem rigorous, ruinous, and down-right ridiculous, but it’s all to make you who you’re meant to be. “Don’t ask for a lighter load, but a stronger back.”

Maybe the person who sits two seats ahead of you in Poly. Sci. had to take a little pink pill in order to make it through the day without anxiety. Maybe the person you bumped into in the halls is going through home life issues, ones you can’t even understand or begin to. Maybe the person who sits two pews behind you in church is trying to construe some sense of the loss of their loved one. Maybe that tall blonde girl in the boots who loves Erin Andrews is dreaming of a perilous death of her discontent winter.

One of my favorite collections of poetry called Strange Light by Derrick C. Brown includes that poem “Instead of Killing Yourself.” The poem ends with the words “the red washing down the bathtub can’t change the color of the sea at all.” Wallowing in your own self-pity and pangs of pain, constantly questioning every occurrence in your life, and giving into that demon of despair won’t miraculously change your world for the better. It will be the strength that you ask for, rather than the suffering you succum to, that guides you through it all.

Just because you’re stuck in this horrible rut of a situation in your own discontent winter of your life doesn’t mean that you can’t catch the snowflakes on your tongue. It doesn’t mean you can’t go sledding every once in a while, especially while you’re young. Go out and ice skate on that frozen pond just for the hell of it: that’s something you could never do in any perfectly-content summer. In Albert Cambus’ novel The Stranger, he says, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger, something better, pushing right back.” You’re stronger than you lead yourself onto believe, whether you want to believe that fact or not. It’s that exact strength, not your weakness, that makes you who you are today. It’s your light in the middle of your darkness, not the darkness in the middle of your light. Now two months shy of 17, I’ve come to see the way the whole “Don’t ask for a lighter load, but a stronger back” thing works.

Don’t beg for that way out of your own discontent winter, but a gleam of hope, a bit of strength, to survive it, and ultimately be content within it.