I once used to see the world with colored glasses, the ones that are said to be tinted with happy thoughts and optimistic ideals. But then I saw the duplicity of the world, I decided to put on glasses that show nothing but the deepest greens of the human soul.

I saw that life is somewhat brutal. It is unfair and it doesn’t show mercy to those who make mistakes.

As a result, I decided to be thick-skinned, to eschew intelligence and embrace mad intuition, hoping that I keep my sanity in the process.

Today, the world is nothing to me but a quick journey, a journey in which nothing can be sowed and nothing can be harvested. I see the world with jaded eyes, not because I wanted to see it in such a way, but because the reality of this world made me see it as such.

I don’t have anything but what I cherish. I don’t boast of gold or glory; all I have is built by my hands, built upon heaps of blood, sweat and priceless tears.

People asked what happened to the supposedly intelligent me, to the one who always talked about facts, factoids and the bigger world.

Guess what?

It’s long gone, thrown into the abyss of memories by the psyche in me who wanted to see me rising high.

In order for me to assume the place in which I stand in this world, I killed it and decided to adopt a memory that is only close, but never the same memory that I have.

People in books always say that the principle “fake it ’till you make it” is nothing but a sad farce. However, it sometimes works for me and of course, like every oddball person who relies on sheer grit to get through, it is really bad when it fails.

But when I do get it, it’s big. I learned to embrace endless risk, to bluff and to shove my way, to defy a world that can be brutal at times.

Therefore, lucky are those who keep their old ways and still rise up high in the pillars of their paths.

And as for people who are in position to change the ways of the game, I did hope that they have brought their players and notes.

Because even though life was built to be brutal, the generations that come after us don’t need to experience it as such.

And as for me, I choose to be optimistic, because even though I live in a jaded world and I have a jaded body, I have a choice to determine my own happiness.