I read somewhere that "When you choose a life partner you're choosing your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 70 vacations, your retirement friend, career therapist, & someone whose day you'll hear about 18,000 times" and I really can't stress this enough.
Stop watching other people’s lives.
Pay attention to your own finances, relationships, health, fitness, and retirement plans. You are the main character in your own life. Focus on that.
If you seriously want to improve your life never let guilt make you loyal to a role that is destroying you. People will call you selfish when you stop playing the version of yourself that benefited them. Let them. Growth always looks like betrayal to people who built comfort around your smaller identity.
how to stop fawning so you don’t get an autoimmune disease:
- pause before answering. say “let me think about that” instead of an automatic yes
- build interoceptive awareness. since fawning overrides your own signals, practice internal check-ins to help you locate your own stance before defaulting to someone else’s
- practice with small boundaries first in low-risk situations to build tolerance for the discomfort that follows disagreement
- recognize that another grown adult’s feelings are never an emergency
- resist the urge to apologize when you’ve done nothing wrong
stop emotionally caretaking grown adults and your health will thrive.
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Almost no one is crazy enough to go all in. So if you are one of the rare ones willing to do an absolutely insane amount of work you'll win more than you'd ever imagine
Greatest lesson I've learned this year is you can't have one foot in your old life and one foot in your new life and expect change. You have to fully commit to the new life.
The older I get the more I can see how intentional joy is. It’s so easy to be a bitter negative Nelly, it takes courage and 24/7 effort to choose happiness. To choose love and light.
Loving someone who cannot love you the same way in return is not weakness. It's one of the most courageous things you'll ever do. You are putting your armour at their feet and you are saying "I will not fight you in this. I have loved you and that means that I have already won.
"They're not confused" isn't always accurate either, some people genuinely are torn between wanting something and not being ready for it, that's different from clearly not choosing you, though the practical advice to detach and move on often makes sense regardless of which one it actually is.
they stopped blaming their parents. their ex. their childhood. not because none of it hurt, but because they figured out they're the only one who can fix it now. the day you own your part is the day you get your power back.