ARE YOUR PROBLEMS BIG ENOUGH?

I am a college going kid and it might paint a picture in your head that I am naïve and raw and probably haven’t even seen the adversities of life. Well, to some extent that is true; I might not know how pathetic it is to go to bed with an empty belly or how traumatic it is to be a victim of domestic violence or for that matter sexual harassment. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand that these issues are morally depraved and highly unacceptable, but at the same time I also don’t believe that this can be a reason for putting my mental agony on a lower pedestal. Afterall, it isn’t a competition. We all got our problems which seem like insurmountable humongous boulders and we all feel defeated at a point of time.

There might be a person who cannot leave drugs no matter how hard he tries or there can be another guy who is dejected in himself for not acing the tests for which he worked so hard or a girl who didn’t win that fashion show for which she has been dreaming of winning since she was eleven; the list is endless. If I were to talk about teenage problems, I would’ve written a review on the movie “The Breakfast Club'', but this article isn’t about that. The point is that you have different problems and your problems don’t need validation by society or someone else because of the simple fact that we all have different priorities and different things hold different amounts of importance in our lives. All of us are not caught up with drugs and neither do all of us want to win a fashion show. Insofar why is it that even though through the eyes of the people our problems are very small yet they look so big to us? The simple reason is that most of us don’t embrace our individual identities and most of us (including me) don’t realize that our problems are our own and no one except us can truly understand the significance of the issues we’re dealing with.

However, more often than not, most of the complex predicaments have the simplest solutions.

I don’t need majors in psychology to say that the first step to get out of any problem is to accept that there lies an obstacle in front of you that is obstructing your path. One can never get out of one’s problems by remaining in sheer denial. We can weave a web of blatant lies for ourselves to attain a bubble lived relief but ultimately, we end up being caught in a problem that is much more aggravated than the original one. It’s not like acceptance leads to immediate relief but it certainly is a step in the right direction. Big changes take time; Afterall Rome wasn’t built in a day. We surely can adopt different routes after this step. Some of us may find solace in watching a movie or reading a book while some of us feel relieved by discussing our problems with someone; but it is only with acceptance that our journey of self-discovery and self-transformation begins. Our journeys will be different, so will be our issues. We just need to remember that “obstacles are not debacles” and all we need is a moment of epiphany to overcome and crush the biggest of boulders that life throws at us.