Welcome to Life

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Perhaps you've heard this phrase used sarcastically, as I did throughout my senior year of high school. Perhaps you never have, and for that I am grateful, but you read this and immediately assumed it meant something negative. Perhaps you saw this and thought nothing of it because it's fairly simple and just another abstract blog post title.
Whatever you thought or didn't think, I have a lot to say about this statement. As I stated, most of my experiences with this phrase were pretty negative--a teacher would say them as a way of discounting something that caused a challenge, basically saying "get used to it, life isn't served to you on a silver platter and you just need to make it work." Which, yes, is true, in some ways at least, but I think that's an awful thing to do to such a potentially wonderful phrase.
Because welcome to life! There are so many things you've yet to experience, and sure, some of them are awful and will do their best to break you, but so many more are going to help make you whole again if you'll let them. Welcome to life, you're going to get your heart broken and learn to love better again, you're going to go new places and leave bits of yourself in the streets and find new pieces of you in the cafes that you stop in for lunch randomly. There is rarely anything easy about what lies ahead, but you are going to learn to make the best of it and do more than live, you're going to learn to thrive.
Welcome to life; it is a gift and you have every right to make the most of it and become who you are meant to become. We only have one shot at this--regardless of your religious beliefs, we can agree on this one thing: we only have one shot at this exact life as you have it right at this moment--and it's up to us to make the most of it. This is yours, to learn in and grow in and to make the choices that will shape you. So yes, welcome to life, take off your shoes and hang up your coat and hat, I hope you choose to stay a while.

(Originally Published at allthebestjess.wixsite.com/website on November 9th, 2018)

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