Life is a funny thing.

You aren’t really sure what you are going to get from it when you wake up in the morning.

At times, it can be exciting. Other times, it is downright frightening.

The trouble with not knowing what will happen is that you can’t always be prepared for what comes out of the day’s events.

When the day brings sadness and pain with it, it can be hard to know how to deal with it.

Quitting is something I find hard to understand. If you look at sports, you can see bad teams quit all the time. The way I see sports, particularly basketball, if a team hangs 40 points on you in the second quarter and you are down 60-35 at halftime, the game isn’t over. If they can put up forty points in a quarter, so can you.

Albert Camus wrote a lot about the absurdity of life. He talked about a time where one will undoubtedly look in the mirror and see a stranger looking back. In that moment, he says there are three things you can do: 1) accept the absurdity and feel sad or angry about it and do nothing to change your situation. 2) Rejoice in the absurdity, know that that is life and there is nothing you can do about it; it is better to be happy while suffering than to be sad. 3) Change your situation.

The third option has been read to mean suicide by many people over the years. It makes sense because Camus talks a lot about suicide. However, I like to think that that isn’t what he meant at all.

Change your situation by refusing to accept that bad things will just happen to you and you are powerless to affect how your life will unfold.

Whenever I am faced with a loss of any kind, I find comfort in the clicks of my keyboard. Being able to create and construct with my words allows me to feel a sense of control.

I do my best not to sit and feel sorry for myself, because just as quickly as sadness has shown itself in my life, happiness can too.

Over the years, what I have found is that sharing with other what I have written during those times of struggle helps me to deal even more.

Saturday night, the clouds from Sunday’s rain took over the sky. I sat down on a porch and looked up at the moon and wrote this:

I looked up at a starless sky. The moon shone white, but it was ghastly and faint. It was with a heavy heart that I looked at the night- hoping that someone or something would come and tell me that I was not alone, that this pain was temporary, it too would pass. I wanted them to tell me that I would be smiling again soon, that love would return to my life.

But there are no stars tonight and there is a hole in my heart.

Teniente is a junior majoring in journalism and English.