Life Is Hard

As humans, we have a tendency to hurt people. We hurt the people we encounter for a minute if we are unkind. We hurt the people we care about if we make a mistake and we hurt people we don't even know if the mistake we make has a ripple effect (which it almost always does).

Personally, I hurt a lot of people in high school, especially. I don't know why, but this time in my life was a time I only thought about myself ... Literally no one else. I cared about people, but cared about myself way more. I hurt my parents because I didn't want to spend time with them. I hurt my closest friends because I was mean. And I hurt people who didn't even know me because of what I had done to people they cared about.

High school is a place of the highest highs of your life or the lowest lows. I can tell you candidly I encountered both. If you feel like you're on top of the world in high school right now, just wait, darling, life will humble you at some point and it is hard when it does. If you are struggling so bad right now, in high school or not, I promise you it gets better. It won't happen tonight, tomorrow, or even next week, but you have to hang in there because you will crush the people around you if you hurt yourself.

All of us have times in our lives where life just sucks. Life is wonderful, beautiful, and amazing, BUT there are so many days where it's depressing, heavy, and really just the worst. High school feels like all of these rolled into one place where you spend eight hours a day for five days out of the week. You're beginning to mature, but make a lot of mistakes and no one knows whether to treat you like an adult or a kid. Trust me, I know it's hard. Life gets better after high school, but life never stops getting hard. Life will always find a way to pull you down and humble you.

After my junior year of high school I encountered many humbling experiences, and from then on I vowed to only care about other people. I put my feelings, my opinions, my thoughts on the back burner. By doing so I became happy again. I was happy that I was making other people happy and often times felt like a completely different person. However, because of my mistakes in the past, I felt very lonely and didn't blame the people for leaving me. Who would want to keep putting up with someone who is just mean and ungrateful all the time?

I promise, if you feel like that's you, you can change. It's never too late to be a better you and be happy again. My entire family noticed a change. They wanted to spend time with me again because I actually cared about their problems, their triumphs, and their lives.

Now it's been over a year of doing everything in my power to make other people happy and I'm beginning to realize that my happiness matters, too. There's a fine line between only caring about yourself and only caring about others because there are people out there who will take advantage of your kindness.

However, in my search to make sure I, myself, am happy, too, I make mistakes. It. Sucks.

Coming from a period in my life where I only hurt people around me to a time in my life where I only care about others, it is hard to realize that, once again, I have hurt someone.

It's never a good feeling, but I promise if you own up to your mistakes and put in the work to change, you will be fine. You can't control what other people decide to do, but you can decide what you are going to do and how you can control your happiness from here.

From this moment on you can work to not hurt someone again in the same way. We are humans, though. It is ignorant to think you will never hurt someone again, but you can work to not intentionally hurt anyone again. You can try, put in the effort, the hard work. It is hard because when people hurt us we want to retaliate, but you have to fight this feeling.

So if you can relate to any of this, please take this away:

You can change. You can be happy. You will make mistakes, but it is how you learn from them that makes you who you are.

Xoxo,

S