Before 2015 a past too abhorrent and a future too intangible cloaked my mind in a way I was rendered unable to pull outside of. Add the intractable disease I was both genetically and environmentally doomed for ─ depression ─ and I was an oh-so joyful culmination of veritable discrepancies. People knew me adverse of how I knew myself: In the midst of my academic accomplishments, I alone recognized my exasperating position in second place. I alone recognized too many nights spent pleasure reading or gaming when I should have been doing homework, and I alone understood what I managed to pass off as good leadership was really blind instinct.
It took a lifetime of strife before I could realize the only honesty either of these perspectives contain is the
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In short, Ayn Rand taught me how to move forward.
Since I have read Atlas Shrugged, I have been through a lifetime more of conflict. Yet unlike before, I didn’t shatter. It wasn’t easy, by any means. Five years after I finished the book, I still wrestled with the same predicament. Recovery and relapse, an infinite times over, is maybe all my life is going to be. But all the places I have reached in the midst of life 's endless cycle ─ self-actualization, discovery, release ─ make everything I have had to go through to get here undoubtedly worth it.
Maybe I had to lose every identity I was ever branded with before I could take the driver’s seat in my own life. Maybe I had to self-harm to realize that I, a speck of dust in a cosmic galaxy, am significant. Maybe I have to endure over two-hundred more days of barely bearable high school before I realize something about myself I can’t even begin to fathom. It is impossible to know what makes what happen and what leads to what. It is enough to know that, day by day, I am building the strength it takes to stand by who I am instead of digging a hole for myself in the shadows. I don’t make the decision to go back any longer; forward is the only movement I allow myself