Life and Times in Berkeley, CA

What Are We?

Hopelessness, cynicism, and despair are diseases that infect the minds of too many young, talented adults who have yet to make their impact on this world. Once they have infected the mind of a man who has yet to discover himself, they take hold and tear down the soul. They become a way of life, they hold domain over all thoughts and actions day in and day out. Once someone has been fully overtaken by this perfect storm, they fade away into obscurity.

What happened to you? What happened to the person we came to know and love? Where did it all go wrong? Everything in life has been handed to you on a silver platter yet you refuse to take hold of it. You are blessed to have what you have, but, so far, you have failed to take advantage of what you have been given. You have a gift that is extremely rare, but you have decided not to share it with the world. There is someone out there who is waiting for you to come into their life to show them what love is, but you've decided not to go looking. Instead you've convinced yourself that the only emotions you will experience are loneliness, sorrow, and despair. You've embraced depression like a long-lost lover and you don't know how to let go.

When I look into the future, I've always imagined that you would be present at all of the major moments of my life, for the first major success of my career, for my wedding day, and for the birth of my first child, but it seems you may have other plans. You see yourself firmly planted six feet under while we continue on with our lives and you seem to have accepted this as the only road you have to travel down. You have stopped looking for the turn-offs and are going full speed ahead. You may see this as some sort of selfless act, a gesture straight out of a novel from the Romantic period. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but nothing could be further from the truth. Who are you to decide when we are no longer a part of your life and you're no longer a part of ours? You call me a brother, but you have no concern for the pain this would cause. How are we supposed to act when we realize you didn't feel that we we were worth living for? Were all of those times when we were there for you when you needed us the most nothing but a waste? All of those times when we were your family when your family kicked you out of your own house? We fought for you, we felt for you, we suffered with you but your response to that is, "I think it's time to quit."

Humans are capable of anything they put their mind to. We have the ability to be whatever we want to be, but some people struggle to believe this. We can be in love, we can be in pain, we can be bored, we can be exhilarated, we can be the leader as well as the follower, we can be the center of attention, or the lonely wallflower.

Nothing is hopeless, the future is not for certain, we have every chance to make it great. We have a chance to leave a legacy for future generations to aspire to. I don't want anymore of your doom and gloom because that's not what I believe in. When I was going through the roughest patch of my withdrawals after quitting smoking, I stumbled across a quote that struck a chord inside of me. Early in World War II, the Nazis seemed to be blazing their path to victory. They had taken over France and were in the middle of a ferocious bombing campaign meant to turn Great Britain into a giant heap of rubble. War had arrived at the footsteps of a nation that didn't want it. Innocent civilians were dying left and right; it would've been very easy to just surrender. The British people looked to their leader, Winston Churchill, for an answer to make it all stop and he told them, "If you are going through hell, keep walking."

Don't give up yet, because we haven't given up on you. Just remember, we are what we can be.