By Brendon James/reporter

If you are reading this right now, then that means you have not taken your own life.
Countless other people have.

I have seen way too many people needlessly take their own lives because life gets too tough.

Life can be hard sometimes. Sometimes, you need to be harder. Like it or not, some challenging trials will happen in life.

You probably have had the feeling that the world has no place for someone like you, that you are a waste of life. Or maybe, life can get so hard that you just want to give up and forget about everything.

I would be lying if I said I never once considered suicide. There were times when I hated the world and questioned my own existence.

You may have asked yourself, “What is my purpose in life? Why does this world always treat me like some kind of tool? If I died today, would the world care or even realize that I am gone?”

Maybe not the whole entire world, but your friends and family might care. Think about the people you may leave behind and the pain that your death would cause them.

Picture anything you love to do in life. Picture your favorite food, your favorite hobbies, the precious people that you hold dear. Your dreams of becoming whatever it is you want to be when you finish school. Think of everything and anything that brings a smile to your face. Now imagine all of those things being gone because you decided that you want to die.

You are blessed by the simple fact you get to wake up to see another day. You are alive this very second, and you should never take that for granted.

People are dying everyday. There are those who die before they even get a chance of being born. When your time comes, you would have hoped to do everything you wanted to in life, right? I sure as heck don’t want to die with regrets. Do you?

You do have a purpose. God gave you a life for a reason. Do not throw away that precious life.

If people are giving you a hard time and are trying to make you feel bad about yourself, they are the cowards, not you.

So keep being you. Do not ever give up. If you think your situation is bad, there are those who are in a worse situation than you and are still fighting through and through.
Whatever life throws at you, you take the hit and say, “Is that all you got?”