Light of a burned out star

Your entire life revolved around this one goal. Years of hard work, sleepless nights, and an entire shelf of handwritten study notes should have been the key to your success. Upon graduation, your life should become easier, with open doors and a stable job in a field that you love. And everyone who ever doubted you, who told you that you didn’t belong here, would be left behind in the dust.

It would have been a beautiful sight. It’s just not the reality that you’ll get to experience.

You pushed yourself to the limit, you really did. Tried to break through the ceiling to reach higher. Stand up on your tiptoes and stretch as far as you can in order to grasp the stars - but right when you wanted to close your fingers around it, that fucker burned out and disappeared in the dark, empty night sky, and you lost your balance and fell down.

How does one get back up from something like that? How are you supposed to pull yourself together and move on? What the hell is your life supposed to be now after you had it all mapped out?

There’s no time to catch your breath, with student loans weighing you down. With parents you’re not supposed to disappoint. With your reflection in the mirror that you can’t even look into the eyes.

Main topics:

• Mental health - coming to terms with the fact that you »weren’t good enough«, to let go of the frustration, guilt and selfdoubt
• Finding a new path - letting go of your old goals and start on a new path, even though it’s scary and you’re starting from scratch
• Peoples opinions - be it your parents, your friends, people from school or strangers, everyone has an opinion on your situation and your life & you have to decide where to draw your boundaries, where to get support, where to lie and who to trust
• Debt - a problem for future you suddenly appeared in full force, demanding your attention, threatening to crush you. Even as a magician, you can’t just snap your fingers to fix this.

Credits:

• Twine layout: Simple Twine Template by eydika
• Background: Picture by VED on Unsplash