Here for It

    Thomas' final chapter of Here for It is a play between different versions of himself throughout the years.

The youngest version of himself is nineteen while the oldest is seventy-five. The play starts out 

lightheartedly as his twenty-seven year old self says to his nineteen year old self "You're a disaster" and 

he replies "Accurate, So, it all turns out great?" (Thomas 247).  The play begins to get gloomy as you 

realize all of Thomas' future selves did not time travel to tell Thomas that he is happy in the future and 

everything is okay. Instead twenty-seven says "things are going to get really sad for a long time" (Thomas 

247). I'm not sure how I would react if my future self told me I was going to get sad for a long time, I 

probably would not take it well and would ask if there was anything I could do to change this. Twenty-

seven asks forty-three: "Am I happy?" to which he replies "I don't know how to answer that question. Are 

there things that make you happy? Absolutely" (Thomas 249). Thomas' selves have not time traveled to 

say that Thomas will always be happy but just that he will make it through life. But, why is it that we can 

not be happy going through life? What are all these obstacles that we have to face and are they worth it or 

are they avoidable? Forty-three year old Thomas says that he does not know how to answer if he is happy 

or not. Maybe this is because we do not know what makes us happy. We do not devote enough time 

towards finding happiness, we focus on just getting to the next stage of our life alive. During the age of 

forty-three it seems people are still figuring out what happiness is. According to Thomas he has made an 

effort to fill his life with things that make him happy but he is unable to answer if his general state is 

happy. Why can't he answer this question? Is it because he knows he is not happy and he does not want to 

scare twenty-seven year old Thomas? 
    
    This chapter is definitely goofy but it makes me think about if we are working towards a general goal 

in life. According to Thomas in this chapter, I would say the goal is the process and the things that you 

learn in every stage of life. But, should our end goal be happiness? I really do not know. If we are unable 

to answer if we know we are happy or not, does life need a sort of reform? Seventy-five says: "You say 

you want a happy ending, but neither of those worlds is really what you're searching for. For instance, you 

will not live to see a just world. But you will live to see acts of justice" (Thomas 256). Maybe the change 

and the hard work that people put into creating a better world is good enough because no one will reach a 

happy ending. Happiness is not always the goal, but the efforts that derive from refusing to accept this 

might be the goal.  And this may be because it shows how much we truly care about ourselves. We care 

about ourselves and we love ourselves and we might not know this during certain stages of our lives, but 

we begin to see it as we reflect and remember the times when we fought for life and happiness. 

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