I often see myself as lucky when comparing myself to everyone else. I'm only fourteen, and yet I feel both like a newborn baby wrapped in a soft bundle and safe inside my mother's arms and as a woman in her late twenties, with the mind of a new generation and yet in an environment of high schoolers. I feel like the only people who really know me are not the friends I make at school and not even the ones I bring home, but the people who have been forced to watch me grow. The people who have known me even before I closed up like a bubble and hid my feelings. I'm glad to have these people, but I wish opening this secure bubble of mine around others and letting people understand me was easier. The one person who probably knows the most about me is my mother. Because at the end of the day, or the month, or even the year, I am always the one to cave into her welcoming and oh so guilt-inducing love and to tell her all my secrets I deem important enough. We argue all the time, but she always seems to come up with something impossible to argue against, because in the heat of the discussion, my mother can make anything sound plausible. I guess it's a superpower that mothers develop. It's for the best, anyway. When I am asked the question, what are three words you would use to describe yourself? I always go for the generic ones because, one: no one ever pays attention to that anyway, and two: I don't think people would understand the truth. I don't even know what I would write. I am not smart. Smart is when you know things that no one else does before you were even taught them. Smart is figuring things out on your own, developing your own theories, being like Einstein and inventing the light bulb before anyone even knew what electricity was. Smart is not reading from textbooks and listening to people explain a subject before you can comprehend it. Smart is not taking in words used by other people around you and incorporating them into your own speech. That is what I do. Sure, I learn faster than most, but the idea of electric-generated light has never popped into my head. I know about it because it has already been created and demonstrated before my own eyes. If the concept of a chair can be understandable as well as trigonometry, then learning is not smart. It is absorption. I do have the pride to admit that I absorb faster than the average ninth grader. Therefore, I am not smart; I am a sponge. I don't think that is something someone would want me to describe myself as. They'd probably think I just really like to clean. I guess another word I would use to describe myself is a love spreader. From my perspective, you cannot enjoy life without there being any love in it. Love practically emanates happiness. I know I said I was religious, but no one has to practice a certain religion or worship a certain God to love. Love can be found in everything and everyone. I also said that I find myself lucky. That is not because of where I live or go to school, or how many things I have. It is because I have so much love in my life that I sometimes don't even know what to do with it. My parents, my sister, my aunts and uncle, my godparents, my cousins, my best friends, my school friends, my dog… There are so many people who love and care about me, and for that I am grateful beyond belief. In return, I love every one of these people, and more. There is not one person in my life that does not deserve to have love. Every moment of suffering, sadness, misery, heartache and grief is caused by love. But when one weighs the difference between the good and the grief that comes from love, the good always wins. For that, I take the misery and the heartache that comes with taking a chance on love, I takes the suffering and mourning that comes with death, and I take it all in together because love is what makes up life. My last word to describe myself would be faithful. Because for all that I believe is given to me with love, I thank my God for it every night. I wish to never take it for granted, to see the good in every moment I am enveloped in love, to never run away from the pain that might come, but to embrace it so that I can move on with even more love in my life than ever before. So, call me crazy, but that is who I am, and my wish is to make everyone see this, to see the love that is in every single person around them, because we all have hearts, and we all have the ability to love. No one can deny the fact that love always has happiness planted like a seed within its roots, through its stem and flowering out of it like a gift. No one can ignore the fact that when a soul is taken from us, we cry because we loved them and now we cannot enjoy this love with them any longer. In love, I seek happiness, and I always find it.