There's a quote from C.S. Lewis that says "Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn." Our experiences shape who we are. These experiences change us some for the better others for the worse. Yet every single time we learn something. It's like as a child we get in trouble for something silly like pulling our sister's hair out. Now when we grow older we realize we will get in trouble for something like that and more than likely we won't be doing it again!
My experiences have shown me just how much to value life and most don't realize that until they get older and some massive, shocking event happens to them. Sadly for me that massive, shocking event has already happened. It just happened a little earlier than typical. As a teenager, I was faced with the events the average person doesn't face until they are in their elderly age. I'm not old. I am only sixteen and I feel like my experiences have made me wiser than your average. This disease made me grow up real fast. I haven't gotten your average teenage experiences. I instead have had to grow up and learn to live with adult situations like death and making major choices affecting the way I will live the rest of my life. Those choices not being what college I will attend but rather what treatment options will give me a better quality of life.
Without the experiences I have been faced with there would have been many opportunities I wouldn't otherwise have been given. I've met so many different people and have learned acceptance far beyond most kids my age. I have spent more time inside a hospital than many do in there lifetime going through surgeries, scans, procedures, emergency visits, and meeting more doctors than I could have ever cared to know. Yet all of this has taught me about strength and bravery. It's shown me that you are able to survive what you think to be the unsurvivable. That bravery is waking up everyday to face another day of the same pain that you fell to sleep with begging that you wouldn't wake up feeling that same pain you felt the day before. For some reason I have learned to live with the pain not because I am strong enough but because I have to. There's no other choice out there.
It's not my age that has given me this wisdom but those experiences I have been faced with. Sadly I was one of those who had their experiences happen faster than the others. My experiences have given me this wisdom and I am sure the woman in the photograph would feel the same way. In a way the comment "wisdom comes with age" degrades the young adults saying we are unable to have that knowledge because we aren't old enough to face those experiences that are faced by adults everyday. I have met plenty of adults who don't seem to posses this wisdom. If you walk into a high school and listen to some stories that teenagers have to share maybe that would change your mind. Teenagers face many hardships that have had to change our lives just as adults have. Many of us have gone through hell to get where we are today and that has given us the knowledge to carry on. We've learned we only get one chance at this life and we have to do it right.
