There are people. There are backgrounds. There are personalities.

This is life.

It could mean missed chances, but it could also mean new chances opened up: new environments and new people and, well, new stories.

The what if’s that correspond with life are an aggravation on their own. I am constantly bombarded with strange visions of what my life could have been had I, say, never gone to a Chinese school. Or I’m wondering what my life could have been if my hair had never been pulled harshly by a girl in my class. Or I’m thinking up possibilities with guys who once flirted with me before I closed up because I didn’t want anyone to know if I liked them.

And now I’m stuck.

I’m stuck in mud and I don’t know how to escape. Perhaps if I had taken a different route, I would have reached the illusory imaginings I once dreamed of having, that peaceful and calm lake, surrounded by a canopy of trees where life is perfect.

Maybe, even, I would be at the mall with a bunch of girls I admired from far away, buying makeup, buying clothes, buying shoes, and simply enjoying life, no worries, no pains.

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I took a pathway that intrigued me a bit, mostly because it was the easiest to take at the time. When I attended a Chinese school, it had not been my desire to go, but that of my parents. When that girl pulled my hair at age seven, I had no desire to go through that again. When that boy flirted with me on vacation, the desire to even think about going out with him hadn’t even entered my mind.

So it was the timing, it was the parents, it was the fear. The stories and the events piled on top of each other, overflowed to push me forward, to push me to where I am now.

I know now that it’s not only me, however. It is everyone else. You.

Parents, the beings who brought you into the world, can set you at the entrance of that great forest. Friends, those people you run into along the way, can influence you in the direction you choose to go. Decisions, the path you decide to set foot on, can last for a lifetime.

So yes. It is not only me.

I am but one of the many travelers of the world. Sometimes, I come into contact with another. At other times, I am cooped up by myself with nothing but my words and a piece of paper.

There is no point in dwelling in what could have been, no point in reminiscing about past opportunities.

The old saying is true in every sense: when one door closes, a window opens.

It is by this belief that I know, no matter who I am in ten years, or fifteen years, or thirty years, that I will never be lost.

And neither will you.