Dear New Year.

Dear Naveena,

I feel like we all use time as an excuse now. We wait for days, weeks, months, and even years to start that journey, project, idea we always wanted to do. Time has become an oppressive force for so many people that they start to see the world in numbers, and soon even you saw the world in numbers and it was suffocating.

So now as I write you to remind you that even though you felt lost, undeserving, unimportant, you still lived through it all. I am so proud of you for doing that for living through something that took away every single part of you. When you watched those movies that used to give you so much empowermnet and strength, you felt nothing. You replayed them over and over again trying to find that strength, but it was gone. Then you listened to the songs that gave you peace. again. nothing. You looked at yourself in the mirror and used to love the skin, eyes, soul inside the person staring back at you. You felt no love. You felt nothing towards that person. You felt like you are nothing. Then you went to the last thing that powered all your life force. Your picked up your pencil and opened up to a crisp page in the sketchbook you loved so dearly. You drew but the lines were all stiff or crumbly. You couldn't make anything. It all looked so ugly. There was nothing in your art anymore. You were nothing. Absolutely nothing to offer the world. You had no purpose.

You laid in bed staring up at the popcorn ceiling. It was the only thing you could do every single day. Your body soon started shrinking. Your throat felt so dry because you deprived yourself of every human need. You had no purpose so what was the point.

One day you write and as you write you realize what life really is. Life isn't about purpose. Life was never given to you so you had a purpose. Life was given to you for existence. That is it. You live and breathe just to exist. That is it. That is the truth and that is the secret to life everyone has been obsessively searching for. We live to exist.

As time goes on, continue existing more than finding your purpose, your passion, some intangible concept. Those don't matter as much as existence. Exist loudly and proudly. Exist as who you are not what the world wants you to be because that will only bring you pain. Do not repress yourself for someoene else's approval because the only approval you will ever need is from yourself. Do not let someone place a value on you, you place your own value. This life was given to you, so exist in this life proudly and for yourself.