Imagine this, for a moment:
You are 16-years-old, and you are sad. You are so sad, that you feel like you have nowhere or no one to turn to. So you pick up a book. It's a book you've leafed through numerous times. It's tattooed with dogeared pages, highlighter bleeds, pen markings...
So... this book. It isn't just any book.
It's a book that changed your life. Challenged your way of thinking, and held your heart between its pages. It saved you once, when you wanted so desperately to put an end to your existence. It was there on your shelf, and beside your bed, and in your hands.
Imagine this, for a moment:
Your heart wants to be radical. It's so sad, that it wants to do something brave. So it tells your hands to get a pen, and you look up the author's address on Google, and you do the one thing that book taught you how to do — you open up. You put down on paper exactly how you feel. You tell the man, whose name is Stephen, your story. For the first time in your life, you are completely honest. Completely vulnerable. And after a while, you forget. You forget that you wrote the man named Stephen Chbosky, and spilled your guts.
Until you get a package in the mail. Now you're 18.
The package has a personal return address, from Mr. Chbosky himself. And when you open it up, inside you find a new, and different, copy of the book of you loved so much -- the book that changed your life. On the inside of the book there is a note, and it says, "Two years ago, an amazing young woman wrote me a letter that I was finally able to read. What a soul you are. And remember... 'So, if this does end up being my last letter, please believe that things are good with me, and even when they're not, they will be soon enough. And I will believe the same about you.' Because you — are infinite." It wasn't until you opened up the cover of that book, and saw what Mr. Chbosky had written, that you realized you were really alive — that you had made it.
You are overwhelmed, and humbled to the point of tears, because the person who created the story that saved your life is now aware of yours, and how they helped you. And he even wrote out your name. Then, you start to believe the bravest thought you've ever conjured in your mind. You are infinite.
You were infinite there in your bedroom floor when you would cried until you threw up. You were infinite when the sadness that sat at the bottom of your belly was the only thing you'd swallowed down that day. You were infinite when you held a pencil in between shaking fingers and wrote a letter to someone you admired fantastically. You were infinite even when you thought the idea itself was madness.
Imagine this, for a moment:
You may feel infinite now, but you were infinite all along.
