Why I keep standing

I have done so many horrible things in the past, in varying degrees of severity, both to myself and to others. Some were accidental. Others were deliberate. All of them, I totally regret.

I  know there are people who would want to see me burn and drop dead, all because they hate what they know of me. They know me as far as how much I've shown them of myself, and for some of them, I've shown nothing but reasons why I deserve their hatred and contempt. For some, I'm just a victim of the fact that nobody can ever please everybody, since I can't really control how other people see me. But there are others that I have deliberately acted against, in both anger and bouts of stupidity, and to those people, I am totally guilty. Can't say I disagree; I know perfectly well that I am guilty of those sins.

Sometimes, the guilt is enough to drive me up the wall, make me lose sleep, run around and cry my eyes out. I rarely complain, though, since I myself believe that I do deserve chastisement for all of the things that I've done in the past, and if I don't get my due punishment, then at the very least, the mental torment of knowing what I am guilty of should be enough.

But if there's one good thing that has come out of this predicament, it's the realization that I'm still here, pondering and reflecting on my sins.

After all, I consider the guilt brought by these thoughts to be a reminder that I'm still human, that I still have a sound grasp of right and wrong. And right now, I'm still alive, breathing, not only able to look back on my past and reflect on it, but to look forward and see how much road I still have in front of me.

I'm still alive. I still have a long way to go. My journey isn't over, and I can't let a mile of bad decisions define my entire life and my whole identity.

For these reasons, I will continue to stand and live. I will continue to hold on to the idea that my life is promising, that I can still make it and be proud of myself at the end of it all.

To the people that I have inflicted pain upon, I humbly apologize. But I value my life too much to stand idly by and comply with my own destruction.

Nobody deserves that kind of surrender. Not even me.