A couple days ago, I received some bad news from one of my best friends. She's been hospitalized for over a week due to a serious recurring illness she has. She's doing better now, but still. It was a very unpleasant reality check.

This probably sounds totally asinine, but I feel like my adulthood has been slowly creeping up on me this past year. It's strange to think that, just over a year ago, the fact that my best friend wasn't paying enough attention to me was such a MASSIVE CRISIS. The sadness I felt then seems so puny now in comparison to the huge burdens some of the people close to me have been carrying.

I suppose in a lot of ways, it's a good thing that the people I'm close to feel that they can use me as an emotional crutch. But at the end of the day, I'm still a kid. I have no idea how to solve these people's problems. I feel like a hypocrite when I tell people that life is wonderful and all of the other optimistic crap I whole-heartedly believe in, when these people's lives have clearly been much more difficult than mine. I don't have any real life problems/regrets because I'm too young to have fucked up big time yet. I'm not saying the things these people really need to hear and it just feels terrible.

I'm starting to think that the older I get, the more I realize I still have a lot of growing up to do. Like it or not, I'm graduating in a year. And honestly? I'm scared. I really hate to admit it, but I'm still so fragile inside, like my heart (and my ego) is made out of porcelain. How can I expect to take any real risks when, in so many cases, I've been too much of a coward to play my hand in the first place? The logical solution is to toughen up, but go overboard, and I might lose a part of myself in the process.

Is it possible for a kind heart to be made of steel? Maybe with a heart like that, and a bit of intelligence, I can avoid getting ripped to shreds. And then maybe, one day, I can give help to the people who need it. :(