Immortality feels like driving fast down highway 101 with the top down.

It feels like skating carefree around other ‘big kids’ with Peter Pan-complex in the skatepark at Venice beach.

Immortality feels like running fast along the sand feeling the ocean splash against your calves.

It feels like the warm sun-rays against the nape of your neck on a warm Summer day.

It feels like holding an animal close to your heart and feeling its little breath on your skin. Having complete trust that you will take care of it forever. And we promise we will do so, forever. We promise - and hold tighter. And yet, when we promise forever, it leaves a sadness that cannot be denied. But we are told to promise forevers. And so we lie. We want the lie to be true.

Immortality. A feeling that once felt omnipresent. At some point adulting became the norm. One which I am not the fondest of. Adults are complicated. They can make mountains out of molehills and complaining often becomes the name of the game. Adults are apparently also very mortal: their knees hurt, then they have back pain and then their tummy aches, and so on and so forth. We’re taught to become adults by society: responsible, realistic, risk-averse. That version of adulthood is just another form of dying slowly.

Who the hell wants to be an adult, really.

It doesn’t have to be like this, though. We do not have to become these rigid, achy, narrowminded adults, who only seem to eat, sleep and repeat.

We talk a lot about longevity these days: to the point it seems ridiculous when you see how far too many actually live life, and how miserable they choose to be. Yes, I know - not everything feels like a choice. And some things are not our choice. But we need to understand: that we almost always have choices to make based on what “happened to us”.

We may not be immortal, but the power lies in how we rise after breaking. Life’s beauty is in its fragility, its fleeting highs and lows. The point isn’t to avoid the darkness, but to walk through it with eyes open. To own our shadows instead of pretending they don’t exist, while leaving destruction behind us. What we repress festers. Especially addictions. Denial delays healing. But when we finally face it - when we rebuild ourselves, piece by jagged piece - we gain something fiercer than invincibility: self-trust. We’re no longer afraid to break, because now we know we can rise again and again.

We create our own sense of immortality in a very mortal world.

And who knows, maybe we are not that mortal in the grander scheme after all. So let’s not worry about things we don’t understand: life can be magical, if we want to view it that way. Life can be whatever we make of it. So let’s remember superheroes learn to fly from pain not from luck - and we can all gain that sense of immortality that is usually reserved for superheroes only. Because we can all be superheroes. That is, if we choose so.