I'm Only Human

I've had "Human" by Christina Perri stuck in my head for the past few days. But the more I listen, the more I understand the lyrics. I feel like I can relate to that song on a personal level. "I can fake a smile; and I can force a laugh," one line of the lyrics says.

I often find myself saying "I'm fine" on a regular basis. I often cover how I feel with humor and sarcasm. I've had people tell me that I have no reason to feel like this. I have great parents, family, and friends. But what they don't know is that that is what I want them to see. This is about being insecure. I've been insecure my whole life. I never thought I was good enough and often cried myself to sleep because of it. I'm human. I feel pain. I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. I always wondered what it felt like to not be insecure but it's so hard to imagine because I've grown accustomed to it.

That's my biggest fear: Not being enough.

"I can take so much; 'Til I've had enough," another line in the song said.

I may have hit that moment where I've had enough. But even with that thought, I feel like more weight than necessary is being placed on my shoulders and is slowly pushing me into the soil of the earth.

If you've read my books on Wattpad, you would know that I often sneak a reference to depression and its causes into my stories. My book "Desire" has a character who is dealing with a strong depression in the years following his father's tragic death. His entire family seems to have moved on. His mom got married, his older brother moved out, and his younger brother was too young to remember the fateful day. This shows long-term depression.

My novel "Unexpected" shows short-term depression in the published edition. A character went through a time in his life a couple years before the story takes place, where he felt the pressure of being the child of a teen mom and being abandoned. The weight buried itself onto his shoulders. He started drinking and got into the wrong crowd. It ended up being his mom who helped him get through this.

I'm not new to feeling this way. Hell, I've felt it my whole life. And it has been a living nightmare. We live in the social media generation where people hide behind a screen to bully others. Half of them being as young as 9 years old. Why is it so hard for people to be nice these days? You never know what someone else is going through. The person they could be bullying can possibly have strong suicidal thoughts. Why can't we just accept the fact that everyone's human and we should be careful about what we say to them?

We are living in a time where the media says you have to look and act a certain way to get anywhere in life. It's stressful to be someone who feels uncomfortable living to those standards but still feels like they need to fit in. My senior year of high school, I was on the brink of having an eating disorder because I felt so ashamed of my body. I skipped meals and would only eat once a day. I had a teacher who noticed this sudden change and she asked me about it. I told her and from that day on she kept an eye out for me. If she noticed I was starting to look unhealthy, she would say something. But to this day I still feel insecure about my body and would sometimes skip meals. I once cried over my dinner because I felt ashamed of myself. My mom had to take my dinner away and comfort me. Like I said, I'm not new to this stuff.

"I crash and I break down."

I know that we are all going to struggle with this stuff at one point but we're only human and we can't change that but we can say something.