Change

Dear loved ones,
I hereby declare: we are never stuck. Any situation or condition can be changed, it all depends on our efforts. Great efforts bring great results.
But change isn't something easy to achieve, specially when there are alternative ways. Luckily, for me, changing was never an option. By the time I felt I needed to change, it was either changing or dying because I was sick of it all.
When nothing else seemed to make me want to be alive, I decided to change. And getting to the rock bottom was important because there was nothing to look back to. And there's another important thing about changing. Once the decision is made, the past is gone, and there's only moving forward.
The days I felt weak were the worse. The ones I saw how useless my efforts were being, how it was all just a dream. But on those days, I just kept on going. Even if I didn't believe in anything, I kept on going, and that was it day after day.
I, that for days and days thought would never set feet on Canandian ground, am 2 weeks from my departure back to Brazil - 22 weeks have passed since the beginning of my stay in Toronto. I, that was always the chubby guy, the fat guy, am today in my best shape so far and it feels great. I, that never thought could be good at something, got 96% of approval among my students.
In Toronto and NYC, I partied, enjoyed, laughed, cried, got drunk, got high, loved, got broken hearted, got stressed, depressed, blown away. I struggled with the past and tried to plan my future.
I found out that none of the worst scenarios I had seen myself were true. I saw that being happy is possible and that people that tend to be melancholic, as myself, will never be able to foresee what happiness feels like. You got to go there and feel it.
Beucase then you'll understand that there is so much more than the achieving the final goal. It's everything we see in between. It's everything we learn. From grocery shopping for yourself until admiring the love of a family from a country you don't really know how to locate on a map. How humans behave differently, how we love differently, how we are more alike than different. There are so many things to describe that the only thing to do is to recommend: go somewhere else than the places you've seen.
I've changed. And it's scary to be coming back. There's no way to know what I'll face, how things will change or even what I'm going to do.
Life has never been so unpredictable and fragile. But also, for the first time, it feels that, whatever it is that my life turns out to be, it will only be a reflection of my wishes and my efforts.
You should try it whenever you feel like it.