Feeling Hopeless

If you’re feeling hopeless, like everything is going wrong and nothing’s going to get better – what I want you to do is get a piece of paper and start writing. Write out everything that’s going wrong. Make a list of it, get it all out of your head so you can see it. It’s all the same place. It’s all concrete right here. Then it doesn’t feel so overwhelming. And then what I want you to do is I want you to sit: today, I’m in ninth grade and I’m blah, blah, blah. This is what I have to do. What do you think comes next? What will high school be like? What do you want college to be like? What do you want your life after college to be like? Where do you want to live? What do you want to do? What kind of people do you want to be around? You know, what kind of job you want to have? Do you want to have grandkids someday? I want you to stretch it out into the future. When you take your vision more wide instead of right now, it’s easier to see: okay, right now life sucks, but clearly I won’t be in this exact same place forever. When you look into the future, then it becomes not quite so overwhelming or seeming like it’s going to last the rest of your life.