Helping a person you don't know with no regard for your own safety. Telling yourself that you have a problem and choosing to fix it for your own wellbeing. Doing something you've never done before. Taking a risk. Allowing someone to get to know you. Letting yourself love somebody. Courage. These are simple things we may do everyday or hard things we may do once in our lives but they all have something in common. They all take courage. I don't know about you but every time I do one of these things, I get a feeling in my stomach. It is the same feeling each time. A mix of anxiety, a splash of excitement or hope, and a tightening of your chest. Very similar to the butterflies you get when you walk by your crush or maybe even your partner. I think this is because love and courage go hand in hand, though similar they are not the same. The strange feeling you get is the definition of courage. No words can describe it, nothing written can explain it. Even this article is not a definition of what courage is, because similar to love; it is something you feel. 

It's funny, when I was a small child I thought courage and bravery was only in story books, that the only people who were brave were the ones that fought dragons and saved the princess. When I was a kid I thought courage was in big actions only, like saving someone else's life. I never knew of small acts of courage. Now that I am a teenager I'm only starting to learn about the small acts. Just the other day while discussing this paper my friend pointed out that it will take some courage to ask someone to prom. I never thought of that. Courage happens everyday in small and big ways, this has been proven to me time and time again but I always seem to miss it. My mom has courage when she lets her eldest daughter go out with her first boyfriend. My sister has courage by letting her heart try to find its soulmate despite the fear. My dad has courage by facing every day with his joking smile despite all the loss he has seen in his life. I too have courage by pursuing my dream despite the risks. Everyone has courage.

I've been reading the book The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, it talks about the Vietnam War and a few select young men who fought in it. It tells of what they had seen and what they had done, it even makes mentions of how life was when they came home. They all believed they were children who weren't brave. They didn't think what they did was courage at all. I can't honestly say I have the right to determine which one of these men had courage. This is because to me every single one of them had more courage than I could ever hope to have. To go and fight for our country, when the very country who sent them wasn't behind them, is courage. To see the things they had seen and lose the things they lost, yet still managing to go on, this is courage. I could go on for a long time about the things that had happened to the men in this book but I won't. Why? Because I think that courage is not always something that should be flaunted or celebrated. What these people did was nothing short of heroic and astonishing, but I think if we were to really think about it, they'd rather have the legacy of that friend they lost told than the story of how they had tried to save them. At least for me, this is what I would want. For them to live on in memories as an individual; not to live on in stories as the person I had tried to save.

Courage comes in all shapes and sizes, it is big and small, it is scary and exciting. It is the mix of anxiety with the splash of excitement or hope and the tightening of your chest. It is the asking someone to prom or saving another's life. Courage is nothing short of remarkable in any situation. It is part of life. No words can describe it, nothing written can explain it. Even this article is not a definition of what courage is, because similar to love; it is something you feel.