Life sucks sometimes. We go along living our day to day lives until something shitty happens and we wonder how something so horrible could happen to us. It's true, I've been there. Things completely out of my control have messed me up and I constantly wonder what I did to deserve it. The truth is, sometimes I've done everything right. Life simply takes its own course and as much as we like to believe we have ultimate control, it's not always up to us to decide what happens. At this point, I would take matters into my own hands by opening Pinterest, like the white girl I am, and search for quotes that fuel my misery. It's ironic to think sad quotes would somehow make me feel better, but I always came across words that made sense; the only reason I got hurt is that I cared too much. It became simple: to solve my problems I would have to invest less in people and things to ensure I never got hurt again.

This change of mind causes a fork in the road, to continue caring and occasionally suffer or to become a new person, consumed with not feeling anything. Some may pick the latter, but as John Green once said, "It hurts because it matters." Effort, empathy, and anything that makes us human tends to hurt us at some point. Things don't go as planned. People break your heart and you're left feeling empty. But it becomes all about perspective and the way you handle the situation. We choose to give meaning to things; if we didn't, no one would put energy into chores and commitments. John made the point that things suck, we all know they do, but the reason that they do is that something was important to us and went awry. Whether we lost something or had it taken away from us, at once point it made us feel whole. It brought happiness to our lives even if it was only temporary.

The importance isn't to dwell on the hurting, it's to acknowledge the pain, feel it in its entirety and be grateful that something had the power to make you feel as awful as it did. That means it mattered. Moving forward, we can ignore that feeling of wholeness, or we can continue to love the things that make us happy and risk getting hurt. It all depends on if it's worth it. John Green thinks it is, and so do I. To feel happy, we need to experience pain, not consistently, but on occasion. And maybe not to understand happiness, but to know when we experience it and to appreciate when it's there.