10 Difficult Realities You’ll Continually Face Until You Learn How To Accept Them
1. You are not excluded from the human condition. You feel hopeless? You feel like you’re on the brink of tears every other hour? You hate who you were and you are afraid of who you won’t become? You’re experiencing a very real, very difficult part of what it means to be human. But thinking such suffering is abnormal and unavoidable is what will be most painful– resisting it, running from it. You can’t seamlessly execute your life with grace and charisma at all times, if ever really, and it’s in comparing whatever you are to that infallible ideal that you’ll hurt yourself the most.
2. The best people, the most beautiful people, the people who are best able to love completely, are the ones who have been wounded and scarred and have experienced the most. There is a certain understanding they bring to you, a certain fondness in identifying with what you’re experiencing and an appreciation for all the ways you’re unsure and unsettled with yourself. They have the kind of capacity to care that only comes from firsthand understanding. They will love you when you are together and they will love you when you are in pieces. Choosing not to love someone for their past experiences is a sad way to overlook someone who is already carved with more depth than others.
3. The most painfully effective way to know that you truly care about someone is to watch them walk out of your life, time and time again. And it’s important that this happens. What you take away from a relationship is often far more important than having had it. There is no better way to really dig into people and uproot what needs to go. And there are few times that you’ll be more desperately exacerbated for someone’s attention than right after that break up, and the way you respond to that often says a lot about the state of your being. Learning to see that objectively is difficult. But when you’re far enough away from it, it always seems to make sense.
4. There are many things that will torture you in your life. Continually allowing yourself be one of them is a truly unfortunate waste and a misuse of the time you do have to heal yourself and enjoy what’s left.
5. Love is not an incomprehensible mystery. It is universal and freeing and comes to us in a million different ways. It comes when we least expect it and when we most expect it. It comes from family and from ourselves and from friends and from doing things we love and from strangers and yes, from romantic partners. Not having one does not mean you don’t have any of the rest. You’ll spend a significant portion of your life in search of love in many different forms, and it’s only one day that you’ll realize you’re thirsty and swimming in the middle of an ocean. You either drink or keep suffering. You either start seeing the love that’s around you or it will never be enough.
6. Saying something is “hard” is ultimately a justification of just doing what’s easiest. Excuses rarely mean anything. Nothing worthwhile is easy. Saying you can’t because you’ve been through x, y and z is just another way to excuse yourself from the grind that is life. Nobody respects that. Nobody says “aw, poor thing, they didn’t pursue something because they suffered from their experiences.” No. People who are legendary that are the ones who kept going in the face of adversity. That’s what makes a story incredible. That’s the plot line of a daily life that means something. That’s what makes someone extraordinary. That element of suffering is crucial. You have to grow from it, not be defeated by it.
7. The best things often come disguised as the worst things. You have to let yourself be gutted by them. They’re making way for something far greater.
8. Ignoring your feelings will not make them go away. Suppressing your issues only amplifies them while you’re unconscious of it and silently rips away at your life.
9. The idea that any one person knows it all is false… yes, myself included. We can only ever speak to our own experiences, and from those, we can offer what we’ve learned to other people. But that doesn’t encompass all of the intricacies of that other person’s life. If you’re searching for answers you have to read a lot of different people’s work, understand what they’ve learned from their experiences, read theories and ideas and fiction and whatever else somehow calms a little part of you– and see how it applies to you. You cannot follow anybody else’s guidebook but you can, and should, take ideas from them whenever you can.
10. You cannot dilute the significance of your ability to choose by ideas of fate and universal guidance. You choose happiness. You choose love. You choose to settle and you choose to not. Not taking responsibility for your life leaves it in the hands of a reckless and seemingly uncertain universe. There are times to be complacent and then there are times to stand up and be a complete bad ass. There are times you have to demand respect and pursue your goals, no matter how small they are, with complete irreverence for the fact that you could fail. There are times you can be complacent and there are times you have to be accepting even if it nearly breaks your heart. Half the battle of life is figuring out when it’s time to do so.
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