Call me Benny. I am your average teenage New Yorker going through an average life in a first world country–at least thats what most people would believe. I like to believe that everyone has a story to tell, some less extraordinary than others, but from the privileged to the unfortunate, every man carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, at one point or another. My story is far from heroic or inspiring–given that my hardworking immigrant parents did all the suffering for me–but it is a story I want to tell. I was in the 12th grade, my final year of high school. I changed a lot during my high school years. The biggest change was the fact that I actually got a girlfriend my senior year. People probably look at me funny for saying that but I’m not good with women and,when I finally got into a relationship with a girl I liked,I felt like I was living in Emerson’s ideal world. But, it was more like Melville’s tragedies because it ended in a train wreck, like most stupid, young relationships. I was cheated on and she left me for her ex. This doesn’t seem like a big deal–almost everyone goes through something like this-but, for some strange reason, it was a big deal for me. It was the first time I felt real pain since the death of my grandpa back in middle school. I did not know how to cope with it and I felt emasculated, helpless. I also may or may not have cried in my room alone in the middle of the night with a bucket of ice cream but that is besides the point. The point is that when the weight of the world seems to be on your shoulders–the weight of your crappy job, weight of war, the weight of poverty, the weight of losing a loved one, the weight of heartbreak or the weight of webwork–you learn to embrace the weight and lift it. I learned that, like a gift covered in dog manure, “your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.  Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.” Khalil Gibran told me that. Out of suffering and hardships, a man becomes the strongest version of himself. So embrace the pain of the long journey ahead, and deal with it while you look towards achieving your “goals” someday. But, you’ll eventually realize that the journey itself was the goal all along.