Two Words You Might Really Need To Hear Right Now

The world is such a scary place at the moment. Yes we’ve had many scary times — but these are different problems arising from the Coronavirus, from health to finances.

And for those who are surviving all this with both those things intact, perhaps it’s their mental health that’s suffering from being cooped up all the time.

Sometimes I think about all that is going on, and about our leadership, and I think it’s the end of the world. We’re about to go through the apocalypse.

But then I remind myself of how many times people throughout history have thought it was the end of the world under much worse circumstances. And, maybe hard to believe, but under worse leadership.

Even on a smaller scale, I’m sure we’ve all experienced times when we thought our lives were over. Or maybe it’s just me, because I have a flair for the dramatic sometimes.

Apparently so does my eleven-year-old sister, because she’s going crazy that she can’t go to school. Not because she misses school, but because my sister and her crush had just found out they liked each other. They hadn’t even spoken to each other, but in her head she had plans for that to happen soon.

Now her plans are thwarted by a virus that has very real implications for thousands of people, but in her little world, she just really wanted to talk to her crush.

When my sister was five years old, and I remember her biggest problems were that I didn’t play with her enough, her best friend wouldn’t let her be Elsa at recess, and one of the boys in the class was mean to her. They seem like such small things, but to her, it was her world. Just like her crush is now.

She reminds me of when I was a child and I used to fight with my best friend all of the time. 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, and yet I think we always react to them the same. Maybe there are a few who develop the wisdom to know that they’ll get through it, because they’ve been through worse. But when you are going through a hardship, it’s difficult to be positive and think that everything will be okay. Through every hardship, it’s important to have people there who will support you.

Someone who really stands out to me is my old roommate, Rachel. I love venting, meaning whenever I’m upset, angry, happy, any kind of emotion, I just need to talk about it. Whenever Rachel was around, she would listen to me. Whenever I felt distressed over anything, she would simply say, “It’s okay.” She said those two words to me every time I needed to hear them, even though I didn’t know I needed to hear them.

“It’s okay” were the two most comforting words to me throughout my college years. Whether I had 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. Now that my sister can’t talk to her crush, it’s the end of the world. For the bigger things in life, it really does feel a lot bigger than it is.

Whenever I go to the dentist (I’m really scared of the dentist), I text my friends telling them I’m going to die from torture. Afterward, they ask me if I survived, and I say just barely. They point out that still meant I survived.

So, even if you barely survive, the fact is that you are alive. You can move on and get through the problem you’re facing. And if you already know you’re okay, then maybe someone else needs to hear those two words.

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’re okay.

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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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