I think theres a really big difference between just surviving, and truly living. When you just play everything safe, dont take any chances or dont try to push your boundaries, or dont take any risks in your life, then youre not living. You need to embrace the chaos and insanity brought onto you by yourself and others, and harness those situations and look back on them, learn from your mistakes and accept that everyone, even yourself, makes mistakes, and its nothing to be ashamed of. You need to learn to accept what happened, but not grieve over your mistakes, only learn from them and really try to understand the moral to all of your mistakes, and remind yourself not to make the same mistake again. To truly live, you must go through periods of understanding all of your emotions, everything you feel, your reactions, your instincts, your opinions, your beliefs, and the individual strength of each emotion. You need to make yourself more familiar with positive emotions, try to gradually turn the positives into your first reaction instead of the negatives. You have to allow yourself to feel happy, you have to give yourself permission to experience the positive side of life. You subconciously shut off most positive emotions when they begin to emerge, because even though you would rather be happy, you're more comfortable being sad, you're more familiar with the negative emotions than you are with the positive emotions. You need to condition yourself to accept the positives, become more familiar with them, then you can begin to live a truly happy life.
