We all have hard times growing up.  Sometimes life really is tough, especially if you’re just going through hard emotional times.

As a young man, my first long term girlfriend was trouble, and led me to some dangerous and illogical decisions and choices in my life.  Her problems ran deep, and I don’t want to relive them so I won’t go any deeper than what I said in the previous sentence. 

Once our relationship was totally broken, I was lucky to have family and friends to help me isolate from the pain of my girlfriend’s problems.  It was so bad that I even decided to change to a new college (I helped my girlfriend go to the original college as I was going to).

It took me years to get my girlfriend and her problems out of my head.  It was very complex situation and in the end I’m the one who left (which made me even feel worse).  I really cared deeply about her, but her issues pulled me mentally into dark and horrible places where I didn’t want to be.

So my point is that sometime you get into such dark moods and places and need help to find your way out.  Untested people (and the media) don’t understand what you are going through and the way that you can get kind of crazy when under such pressure.  I was lucky, I knew how destructive my path would have been had I stayed.  Actually it would have been destructive for the both of us.  Sometimes with people, much like certain chemicals, things don’t mix well and explode, no matter how much they care about each other.

So the point of this post is to describe how to get through these dark periods in your life.

• Family and Friends help, but only if they understand and come from a similar background.  If they don’t have depth in such areas, they can hinder and hurt more than help.  So this option depends!
• People that have similar backgrounds and can help in many ways.  Sometimes going outside of your circle of friends helps!  Support groups maybe be the answer, again it depends…
• Music… knowing that even the best and most successful of us have problem that they had to overcome helps.  After a while, try to mix some uplifting and exciting music your listening too, so that you can improve your mood.  Nothing is worse than dwelling on your pain, which is kind of what I did.  It’s a time and life killer, if it it does on too long.
• Fake it until you make it.  This line of thinking is if you fake being happy, eventually you will be happy.   This works, especially after you hit rock bottom and feel like there is no way out.  Why not give it a try.  You are your own emotional keeper, you control your thoughts, you can become whatever you want to become!

And now that my reasoning is layed out for you, I want to introduce a song from NIN that was my favorite song for few years during some of the most dark periods in my life.  I may have listened to it for too long, but it was cool and made me realize that everybody does though some rough patches:

Here is an uplifting song, that while a bit light, is still fun. I epecially like the lyrics “I’m in the race but I’ve already won, and getting there can be half the fun”.

While I would have like the song above, it came after the dark times in my life, below is a song that worked for me, especially when I was in the martial arts. it got me pumping and I would perform better as I would play this in my head but at a faster rate of play.

Here’s one more song that I liked (and my first exposure to rap). It was a great song and luckily, I didn’t see the video until much later…

I’m not sure why this article came out of me, but it’s Saturday (which is my anything goes day) so I thought I’d share.

-MR