"You're okay, It's okay"

            There’s something really fun, exciting, and scary about being young. You get to continually experience new things, continually learn, and continually make mistakes. The younger you are, usually the less severe the mistake. They don’t amount to the big decisions you have to make about life later, but no matter the age, I think the mistakes you make and the problems you face still affect you in the same way.

            I have a five year old sister, very soon to be six, and I love hearing about her friends and how school went. Right now her biggest problems are that I don’t play with her enough, her best friend won’t let her be Elsa at recess, and one of the boys in the class is mean to her. They seem like such small things, but to her, it’s her world. She reminds me of when I was her age and I used to fight with my best friend all of the time, and then we’d “stop being friends,” and then be best friends again within the hour of our fight. It didn’t seem to matter to adults, because they knew we’d be friends again, but I remember thinking of every fight as life changing, and then forget that fear immediately after we made up.

            When we get older, the problems we face are bigger: kid problems become preteen problems, which become teenage problems, then college/ young adult problems, to just adult problems, etc. One of the guarantees in life is that you will make mistake after mistake and face problem after problem. It’s happened all your life and it always will, though hopefully, the good will always outweigh the bad.

            Through every hardship, it’s important to have people there who will support you. Someone who really stands out to me recently is my old roommate, Rachel. I’m a venter, meaning whenever I’m upset, angry, happy, any kind of emotion, I just need to talk about it, and whenever Rachel was around she would listen to me. Then, if I ever feel distressed over anything, she would simply say, “It’s okay.” She said those two words to me every time I needed to hear them, but I didn’t realize I needed to hear those words.

            “It’s okay” have been the two most comforting words to me this year. Whether I had just gotten a bad grade, or hurt someone I cared about, I would talk to Rachel and she would just say, “It’s okay,” as if saying, “Don’t worry about it. It will all work out. You are okay and you will be okay. It’s not the end of the world.”

            Maybe it’s just me being dramatic, or maybe it is the legitimate way people feel when they are going through something, but it often does feel like it’s the end of the world. Every time me and my best friend fought as kids, it was the end of the world. Every time my sister can’t be Elsa at recess, it’s the end of the world, and every bad grade I've gotten was the end of the world. For the bigger things in life, it really does feel a lot bigger than it is.

            That’s why I’m here to tell you that everything is okay, even if it doesn’t seem like it. It will be okay. You are okay. I went to the dentist today (I’m really scared of the dentist), and I was texting my friends telling them I was going to die from torture. Afterward, they asked me if I survived, and I said just barely. They pointed out that still meant I survived. So, even if you barely survive, the fact is that you are alive. You can learn from your mistakes, you can move on, you can get through the problem your facing. You’re okay. And if you already know you’re okay, then maybe someone else needs to hear those two words.