"Where there is life, there is hope."
        -Laia (A Torch Against the Night   by Sabaa Tehir)

Sometimes I just can’t deal with human interaction. Sometimes I just need to be left alone in my bedroom blasting music with no one disturbing me. These moods just come so randomly, like I will be feeling fine and I’ll go downstairs to the living room and my family will say something to me, could be as simple as “What are you doing?” and something in my mind just clicks and I find it mentally hard not to snap at them for no apparent reason, it will become very difficult to be nice to anybody when I’m in this “mood”. Literally all that I can do about it is just stay isolated in my room until it passes, until my mind decides it is ready to be around other humans. Maybe this makes me a loner, and honestly sometimes I feel like one but I just like being around myself sometimes. I’ll invite someone over to my house, or they’ll invite me over to theirs and I say yes. I get there and sometimes I literally just want to say “Can you leave now please?” or make up some excuse to leave (which I have dine before) I will literally go into settings on my phone and play a fake text tone and say “Oh my mom wants me home, so she’s coming to go pick me up” while casually texting my mother asking her to come pick me up. Like I will take the most extreme measures sometimes to avoid just being blunt and honest and just saying “I’m goanna go home now, I don’t feel like hanging out with you anymore” because I personally think it’s rude to say that. With my best friend which I have known since I was 3 I’m totally fine doing that with but I don’t usually have to because her and I rarely ever get bored of each other. Maybe I’m just a one of those people that only has like that one really close friend and no one else. I could just be anti-socail….. Anyone else get in these moods? Or is it just me? It’s probably just me because I’m a weird ape. WAIT WHAT IF IM ANTI-HUMAN? Omg I just found my soul animal xD

       -Katelynn

Let your old "Friends" go if they aren't helping you grow as a person or not supporting you. You don't need people who envy you. Friends are ment to help you, care for you and love you. You don't need to be popular, or "Fit in", you get to be you because that is who you are let nobody tell you differently. You are beautiful and you shouldn't need to have fake friends to feel that way. Let them go. It's ok to be alone. Branch out and talk to people you don't know, make new real friends and find out who you are in the process. Just remember, you are strong, you can be independent and you are you. Let no one change who you are.
        -Katelynn

                I am a woman. I am proud to be a woman. I believe in fighting for equal rights. Equal rights. I don’t want to be more than men. I don’t want to think of myself as above men, I just want to have the right to be paid the same as them, not more. I think that sometimes women are fighting to be more than males and I don’t want that. Last year, when it was international women’s day, my teacher brought a pack of 50 Timbits (Canadian AF). He walked into the class, placed the Timbits on his desk and began to speak about International Women’s Day. Then, he took the box and only offered the girls a Timbit, instantly once the boys realized what he was doing they started to protest. Every single girl in my class took a Timbit, except me.

When my teacher got to me and asked “Would you like a Timbit?” I simply said “No”. He looked shocked. He then preceded to ask me “Why?” and I replied by saying “I will refuse to take a Timbit until you offer the boys in our class one as well. I will support people fighting for women to have equal rights, but I do not want more than that. I do not want women to be more than men. The whole point of International Women’s Day for women to have equal rights, and you have taken advantage of that and made it look like women are fighting to be more than men and that cannot be further than the truth. I am fighting to be equal.” My teacher didn’t know what to say after that so I asked “Could I please have the box of Timbits?” He handed them to me and I went up and down the rows offering them to not only the girls, but also the boys.

Once everyone in our class had taken a Timbit, I walked over to my teacher’s desk where he was seated, set the box on the desk, took one out and said “Yes, now I would like a Timbit”.

As a woman, I am fighting to be equal and nothing more.

 

       -Katelynn

Life (for me) is all about new experiences. Stepping outside of the box we all live in. Doing something that we’ve never done before, making stupid pointless decisions that we will later regret. I always say “I want to regret the things I did do, not the things I didn’t”. Basically, it means I would rather regret jumping off of the 50ft diving board at the swimming pool because now my body is hurting because of the impact then regretting not jumping and wondering what it would have been like. I always try to live by that rule, to try new and crazy things, instead of going out for dinner at a restaurant I’ve been to 10 times, going to a restaurant I haven’t heard anything about even though it is a seafood place and I hate seafood. It’s little things like that, that give me a sense of adventure, and after a long day, that sense of adventure and difference is exactly what I need.

       -Katelynn

"Writing is easy, all you have to do is cross out the wrong words"
       -Mark Twain

              People always ask me, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' and whenever I am asked that my answer always changes when I was younger I would say 'I want to work in Disney Land' because I loved the idea that I could work on the happiest place on earth and make peoples dreams come true. A couple of years ago, I was asked again by my homeroom teacher and I said "I want to be a police officer" and I said that because I loved the idea of protecting people, and making my life mean something. Now, if you were to ask me what I want to be when I grow up I will say "I want to be a surgeon" because I love the idea of saving lives and giving people another chance and how cool would it be to be able to save lives everyday? My point is, that even though I don't know what I will be when I'm older that's ok right now because I still have time to figure it out but what I do know, is that I want to make my life means something. I want to be remembered as that girl who did that great thing and changed a persons life. I want to be someone who means something to the world. That is my dream, and I don't think that will ever change I will always want to be someone special.
       -Katelynn

Let’s face it, life gets busy. It always does. Sometimes I can go months without anything interesting or time consuming happens but then all of the sudden, life gets busy. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with the speed of life, sometimes you end up falling behind. But that is okay because it happens and there isn’t much you can do about that. One could argue and say you could just work harder but there are only so many hours in a day and only so many days in a week. Right now, I just finished writing 1500+ words for study notes for a test I have on Friday and I’ll tell you, I’ve spent all of my spare time typing out these notes and am no where near close to memorizing them all because I have been busy and I am struggling to keep up with the speed of life. At times it is very overwhelming and hard to handle and I just feel like breaking down and slamming on the breaks of my life, and sometime I do break down but then I go back and pick up the pieces, repair myself and continue on because that is what I have to do. Sometime I wish I could just freeze time, just to get a break but that is not how life works. Life has a mind of it’s own and we will all learn how to keep up with it.

“Just as the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly…”

What we have we shouldn’t take for granted. We shouldn’t waste things that could still be used. Use me for an example, the other day I had a water bottle full of water, but it was day old warm water. So, I took it over to the sink unscrewed the lid and right before I poured it out I thought to myself, why am I dumping out perfectly good water, that I paid for down the drain? I could find another use for it. So I set the bottle down and I thought to myself, well now what can I do with this water? I could just suck it up and drink it like it is right now, I could add ice to it in hopes of cooling it down and making it ice water, or I could go outside and water a tree or a plant. I figured that in wouldn’t enjoy it if I just drank it right then, and I already had another glass of ice water so I should water the plants in my backyard. I took it out to my backyard and watered this evergreen tree that I have had since grade 2. Just doing something small like not wasting water made a difference and it made me feel good about myself for the day, thinking that if I try hard enough I can be a resourceful person.

       -Katelynn