finding-yourself

Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living.

There are essentially two questions in life - a spiritual question and a material question. The spiritual question is 'Who am I?' The material question is 'What am I to do with my life?' One leads to the other.

We all have struggle in our lives. We're all searching for personal freedom, whether we're in a bad place or trying to be true to ourselves.

I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive...I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

It__ okay to get lost every once in a while, sometimes getting lost is how we find ourselves.

Great spirit, Great soul.

I was surfing the Internet for a different sort of education. I surfed for photos of circus freaks and synonyms for the word intercourse and for answers to why staring at the stars in the evening tore my heart with longing.

And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren__, and so anything__reat and terrible__elt possible to me now.

My parents say you__e no good, Elijah._ I exhaled and killed the cigarette in the grass.Laughing, Eli__ eyes went to my lips and his hands touched my bare midriff. __eally? And what do you say?__e had brought his lips so close to mine that it became hard to think about my next words when all I wanted to do was crush my mouth to his. I wanted him to completely consume me. __ think you__e broken,_ I finally got out, and Eli arched a brow. __ut I think I__ broken too. I just don__ know it yet.

When my father was 17, he went to Montreal and found these submarine sandwich shops that were really successful, and weren't in Toronto [his home town]. So he went to my grandparents and said: "Look, you have to give me the seed money to open up one of these places. We'll make a fortune. They've got lines going round the block. There's nothing like that here." And my grandfather's response was: "Look, I'm sure these sandwiches are really good, and if we scraped the money together we could make a lot of money and your mother and I would be really proud of you, but you need to find something that has *magic* in it for you." It was off of that conversation that my father went to college on a music scholarship, started a film club and became one of the most successful directors of all time.

It__ not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it__ any comfort, the dark wood isn__ just that. It__ also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn.

What is really scary is running naked inside yourself, revealing the real you.

The bulk of life is discovering who you are__nd then reconciling that with who you wish you were.

The land of possibility is a better place to make your home than the realm of expectation will ever be

The Truth is, we all get lost as we try to find our way. Perhaps the key is to stop, take a look around and enjoy the scenery as we go.

So they gave me love in form of poison and tiny little pills, programming my emotions, teaching me how to feel. To act correct and talk correct and answer without knowing the question, because that, my dear, is how you get love. Yes that, dear youth, is how you'll be loved. I tried to medicate my own fucked up little mind with chemicals and adrenaline, tasting sweeter every night, shaking louder every time. Sitting wide awake in bed until the world disappears, writing poetry to concentrate on something real while waiting for the love to arrive.I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.)

As we travel great lengths in this world away from home, most of us come back with a clearer view on what home means. And most likely it isn't so much about the place in itself, but more about the places and people that have made us feel AT home_

It doesn__ matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you__e started to leave, you will run your whole life.