Right now at 23? I remain positive because my entire life is devoted to my work and I love every second of it. At 18? I was confused, scared, frightened, and painfully oblivious. I barely stayed positive, broke down frequently, made a mess of mistakes, and constantly was met with crippling moments of total self-doubt which had me wishing I could just wipe the slate clean and start something newer… and easier.

But I never got that fresh start, we build on rubble.

Humans have this weird instinctual desire to create milestones in life. When something significant comes along, we make it our Everest for a day. Sometimes that results in fleeting self-back-patting and confidence, but more often, it’s a deadly crushing blow akin to reading Dumbledore dying while watching a Sarah Mclachlan animal abuse commercial. When you hype these moments up in your life, when you monumentalize everything from a two week anniversary to final exams to even a graduation, you put yourself at risk of worse failure than actual failure. You can break down, you will break down, and my advice to you is to not get hung up on trying to avoid the inevitable cycle of human emotional capacity, and instead try to dampen the blow by de-ritualizing this “life event”.

The most I have ever failed has been when I’ve convinced myself that a certain test, a certain relationship, a certain ceremony, or a certain plan, had to go exactly as I had built it up or orchestrated it to be — yet, infinitely more important, more difficult, and more potentially damaging events in my life occur all of the time. Those things don’t break me, not because of positivity, but because even if it fails, it’s always on to the next one. Life events are no more than product testing, we should always be trying to make something better from our failures, and our failures are necessary to that process. So break down… just don’t break.