People belittle you for things they haven’t even experienced themselves.
They talk about loving oneself before loving others like it’s easy. As if they know how it feels, as if they know how much it actually hurts.
They tell you to be happy, as if being lonely, out of all other existing emotions, was the first choice you settled with, and they will only ask you to think about happy thoughts like you’re a no-good sadist who never thought of doing that.
When you tell people that you are feeling down, hoping for them to make you feel that sadness is a valid emotion too, they just brush you off because they believe that you’ll get over it anyway. They think that every episode of sadness is just momentary; they don’t realize that when you only opt to bury all the depression deep down, you never really get past it. They’ll never know that you only get exhausted from trying to talk it out because you never seem to have ears that will genuinely listen; you never seem to have hearts that will feel how tough it really is inside your brain.
They don’t realize that you only wish for collected thoughts from a healthy, functioning mind, and with this you get misunderstood because you turn your back on difficulties, being labeled as someone limp-wristed who knows nothing better than to run and hide.
It takes countless efforts to try to make people understand that turning your back on certain battles is a form of self-preservation, not selfishness or weakness. It’s about choosing to fight those you can only handle, for life has just given too much pain to endure, the pain you need to bear for lost battles you never seem to let go of, those who have scarred you for life.
What’s comical is that people have witnessed all of the heartaches, all of the obstacles you went through, but they never seem to run out of rocks to throw. They never stop telling you that you have a frail heart—that’s why you can’t let it be caught off-guard. They think that you can’t handle any of it, but they have never been so wrong. You can, but you just firmly decide that you won’t.
It’s always easy to judge someone, easier than being gentle, and we forget that almost all of us are battling inner chaos we avoid discussing. People always forget to be considerate unless the issue concerns them, until the problem bothers them.
That’s why we should stopped giving a fuck about any commentary that isn’t crucial to our growth. We should accept that people will always have something to say, and we have to keep reminding ourselves that what’s important is that we never hurt anyone in our process of growing, on our way to becoming the best version of who we are destined to be.
And that’s what we really need to learn in this life: to filter out the things we absorb, to choose the battles we fight, to turn our backs to those who hinder our success. We need to assert the fact that there’s a difference between being a cold and heartless person, those who do not accept anybody else’s perspective, and a person who chooses to save oneself from those who feed on another person’s weaknesses.
At the end of each day, what we choose and how we choose to act depends solely on us. We give too much of who we are that we forget that we deserve to experience great things too. Remember that there’s nothing wrong with prioritizing ourselves.