Teen Corner – Be sure to handle your heart with care

Teen+Corner+-+Be+sure+to+handle+your+heart+with+care

By Grayson Raleigh, Staff Writer

There will be things in life that will cause a great deal of pain within you, whether it be by death, sad memories or heartache. But for those reasons, that is why you show care and compassion towards the most fragile object to exist: A heart.

Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Tears come from the heart and not the brain,” and that quote could not be truer. The heart is a home for all secrets, feelings and emotions, and when that home is torn apart by an outside force you are left feeling empty and numb inside and unsure of what will come next.

Knowing how tender your own heart is and still allowing it to fall into the hands of someone else can be very scary because you know that at any given moment, it can all come crumbling down because life is short and anything can happen at any time and you will be left there, caught in the destruction, feeling devastated and confused.

In the matters that you can control, make sure that you fully trust the person to whom you’re giving your heart to or sharing your secrets with, because that person may appear to be one way and then turn out to be completely different. Trust is key in every relationship, whether it be with a parent, significant other, or friend.

Losing a special relationship in your life can cause you to question everything, to wonder what you did wrong, why you weren’t enough, why it was all your fault; it was not you at all. You lost that relationship because they simply did not know how to handle a heart with care.

No matter the experience, no matter the hurt, you have to pull through and pretend to be OK with a broken heart until you actually become OK. It’ll take time, and it will probably always hurt even if it’s just a little bit, but it will still be there, tucked away inside, pricking at your heart at your most vulnerable times.

I know first-hand what it is like to feel so consumed by grief that you don’t know what to do. You feel so lost and damaged that you can’t function. I felt that way when I lost both of my grandfathers due to cancer. Watching them both suffer from the pain of the disease coursing throughout their body broke my heart into a million pieces. But that is when you realize who you really are, that is when you see your raw, broken-down human self. It takes pure strength and courage to get out of that stage of grief and sadness and become maybe not who you once were prior to what happened, but to find a new normal.

Once you make it to the point in your life where you have accepted what was and you are looking forward to what will be, you know that you will be OK, that you’ve cared for your heart so gently that it doesn’t hurt as much. You’re going to make it.

The heart can be a safe haven; however, it can also be a painful disaster. It’s up to you how you choose to repair the damage.

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Grayson Raleigh is a senior at Harlan County High School and is a member of the Bear Tracks newspaper staff and student in John Henson’s communications/creative writing class at HCHS. This is a continuing series of columns produced by student writers. You can contact Henson at [email protected] for more information on submitting a column.