Begin Again, Never Give Up

is what an upperclassman from my university put in his entry to a shirt design contest held by a local clothing line two (or three) years ago. The design won. Upon seeing it (in material) for the first time, I felt an impassive air pass between me and the shirt; it took me two years to understand how brilliant it is.


Right now, to be honest, I feel like I have lived for eighty years. I told my friend about that earlier over some tea - we liked to feign class as we were the most well-behaved table in the shop - and she laughed. Apparently, she has a very conservative outlook on life.

I realized last night, when I was trying very hard to sleep because my brain does not know bedroom etiquette, that I am almost at the peak of my youth in a psychological sense. My hormones definitely stopped adding inches to my bones years ago, but my mind still inputs heaps of stuff to its accumulation of "wisdom" and "knowledge", so I am being fed with a ridiculous amount of experience and information everyday. It is exhausting, and I always retire to my bed feeling like the drain in a sink.

It is unfair how we have to feel so much sometimes. Our lives are a tiring cycle of happiness, satisfaction, sadness, and frustration, and since most of us are hedonists, we try desperately to escape the last two phases. When we can't, we try desperately (again) to get on with life, since that is the protocol. And it is the protocol for a reason.

This year, while constantly pushing feeble attempts at recovering, I ended up worse. Mental health is like air in a syringe closed at the tip: too much pressure causes the air to compress so that pushing the syringe farther down becomes harder. "Begin again, never give up" became part of my coping mechanism when I finally understood it.

Today I got home to good news, the first I have received in a long while, and hopefully, the first of many. This made me think over the countless bad decisions I made over the past months, and that this is the last consequence I will get from them. I have reached the threshold and the meter once again ticks to zero. So I

"Begin again, never give up."

When we encounter a dead end, we either get over the wall or turn around and start another route. When the long-awaited light at the end of the tunnel allows us to see the tracks, we start walking again.