When I was younger, I would feel sad, happy, angry, or experience joy, loss, or confusion.  I realized those were all temporary feelings that were spurred on by the moment. Quite recently I have truly thought about the long run.  I realized feelings, situations, objects, are all temporary. We as people grasp so tightly to the feeling of hope, the feeling you will get out of something or into something.  You will, it is because of the long run. The long run is a concept that I now think about every single day, if my friends are sad about anything I tell them about the long run because it is something to hold on to.  Something to get you through the hard times, at least, that is what it did for me.

In 5th grade I was told I needed to have surgery on both of my knees.  I wasn’t sure how to feel, I was completely and utterly terrified to say the least.  No matter how I felt, the day came, the day I had my first surgery. I had the surgery and then I went home, my family and I were told in two weeks I would be back to normal.  Two weeks passed, I still couldn’t walk. I went in for the check ups and my surgeon was very dissatisfied. After about twenty- one days of not being able to bend my legs and barely walk, I began physical therapy.  It was hard, long, and excruciatingly painful. I felt like I could not do it, I was stuck. Not the type of stuck when your sibling locks you in the pantry, I was stuck in my head, my own body telling me, no you can not do it, what's the point, just give up.  For a while that was my mind set, I couldn’t do it, I could not deal with the pain. At least I thought I could not.

We went to a gorgeous beach during the summer, for hours on end I watched as my brothers ran up and down the beach, into the ocean, chasing my dog.  I felt like I would never be ok again. We being my parents, decided they didn’t want me to loose all of the progress I had made. We worked with our current physical therapist at the time to find a good one to use at the beach.  We walked in the heavy wooden doors, a man led us back to a room and said to sit on the table that was in the middle of the room. Then he said to lay down, he then pushed his hands into my very sensitive and sore knees, which were covered by incisions that were not healed.  I screamed, and cried, and occasionally yelled out of shear pain. I did this every single day, the same thing, wake up, see the ocean, go to physical therapy, cry, then go back home.

I was sitting on the same couch I have sat on for what feels like forever, watching tv, reading, catching up on homework, then I began to think.  I began to see how much less my knees hurt, I realized I could look at and touch my incisions without wanting to throw up, I could walk by myself.  In a month from now my knees would be better than fine. That was when my attitude changed, it changed because I realized in the long run, my knees would look better and feel better.  From that day on, I worked harder, I pushed my limits more, I was happier. That all happened because of the long run, I thought about where I wanted to be, and what I would need to do to get there.  I drowned out all of the negative thoughts, which was not easy, then I pushed my limits, and it hurt. That is ok because it was all worth it.

Throughout this experience I have realized that struggling is good; you learn from pain and failure.  I needed to dig deep and see what was ahead of me instead of what I was going through, and how truly stuck I was.  Friends would ask me “How did you do it?” I would say “I focused on the future, I saw what I needed to do.” My belief still stands with the concept with the long run.  Personally for me it was comforting to know that I was going to recover. This could be a story about how I did not recover when I was supposed to, how I could not swim, run, or bike during the summer, and for a while that is what it was, but now I see it is instead about how I learned see further than what I was going through.  I believe in the long run.