Stories from ones who are older and wiser

At the moment I am not always the happiest person and I was discussing this fact with my mother in the car the other day (Because my mum is one of those awesome people who listen whilst you spill your deepest, darkest secrets). I said that at the moment I'm just trying to ignore it and get on with life and she turned to me and said "Gem, imagine you are holding a big balloon. Wherever you go that balloon goes too. If you ignore the balloon it bumps into you so you can't forget. The balloon makes you feel dead inside which you don't like so you try to push the balloon away but as soon as you have pushed it firmly away you turn to see it right by your side once again. What you can't see is that everyone has a balloon. Nobody says anything about their balloon because they don't wont to be the one that 'can't handle it. My mothers generation didn't know how to talk about their balloon so they ignored it, until the time came when they wordlessly passed it onto my generation. I didn't know what to do with my balloon. Because nobody talked about it there was never a solution. But this has to stop. We have to break this vicious cycle. We have to talk about it. We can't continue to push away our balloon because it just keeps coming back so we have to think. We have to turn around and glare at our balloon and shout 'I SEE YOU AND I DON'T LIKE YOU!' because only then will we really begin to understand what our balloon is telling us."
I don't know how well I have managed to understand my balloon but even just yelling at it really did help.