Empty Vessel

Drawing: "Empty Vessel" - Nicole Nolte

Perhaps we feel empty because we leave pieces of ourselves in everything we used to love and we just accept that it's gone. We forget who we are. We lock our hearts away, acting as if it's us against the world but really it's just us against ourselves.  We give up too easily, we're afraid to fight for what we want and what we believe is right because we live in a society where not everyone's opinion is of equal worth to the person next to them.

 If something makes you happy, fight for it. Don't just give up. Stop keeping quiet in fear of offending people or getting yourself into uncomfortable situations because you will regret it. Speak up!  Rather an "oops" than a "what if". We cry when we lose the people we love but we don't realize how quickly we are losing ourselves. We don't realize what we had until it's gone. We don't know real love or happiness until we make a mistake and lose it. We make the mistake of thinking that what we've lost is just "gone". That we have no way of ever getting it back.

We have the power to stand up for what we believe in and change our situation. We can conquer what's breaking us down. Our problem is fear. We give up in fear of potentially making things worse. We drown in self pity and wonder why we're hurting so badly. It hurts because it matters. It hurts because it shouldn't have happened. If it was really meant to be that way (as many people will say in attempt to comfort you), it wouldn't be tearing you apart; it would be setting you free. Just because how you're feeling doesn't matter to someone else doesn't mean it isn't important.

 We've all known pain and we all interpret the world differently. Why don't we give everyone a chance? We obsess over some people that we deem "famous" because they are society's idea of "perfection" (even though many of them may have the emotional range of a teaspoon) yet we ignore what others have to say because they don't have pretty faces to match their pretty minds? We underestimate people.

Although many adults will roll their eyes and say we're being "dramatic" or "we don't understand how the world works", being a teenager is hard when you're constantly being underestimated and misunderstood. When you aren't taken seriously. Just because you aren't wise enough to make the right decisions in terms of age, your ideas are automatically impossible or your opinions are incorrect. Are we really that wrong?  Are we wrong because we're as foolish and ignorant as we're portrayed to be or are we wrong because we have new ideas? New ways of thinking. People don't believe in what we think because we don't think the same as them.

 Being different and thinking differently isn't as detrimental to our success in life as they'd like us to believe. Different is dangerous - not to us- but to the people that work so hard to push people down and keep them there. We haven't been on this planet long enough to make the mistakes our elders have made and learnt from. We haven't been around long enough to see, hear, feel and experience what they have. This makes us less wise, in the eyes of society. Personally, I think this makes us wiser. We haven't been around long enough to be brainwashed and filled with what the world believes is "right".

What we take for granted is, although we live in a messed up world, we as the youth of planet earth (as a whole, not split into different sectors constantly fighting for dominance and superiority), we have the power to come together as one and right the wrongs of the people before us. In a few years, we will be the leaders of the world. Not leaders of South Africa,  not leaders of America, not leaders of Australia, not leaders of any country on it's own. We will be the leaders of the world as a whole. We have the power to do that. We can end the segregation, the unfair distribution of power and wealth, the discrimination, the violence, the inequality.

Together, we can end it all. We don't need to be politically powerful to do it, either. We, as teenagers of the world can change the world with one thing: love. As mentioned in my previous post, if we think with our hearts instead of our minds, we have no limits to the good we can do in this world. The world is only going to know peace when the power of our love overcomes our love of power.