Posts tagged life
The girl in the mirror wasn’t who I wanted to be and her life wasn’t the one I wanted to have.
Life is way too short to spend another day at war with yourself.
I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.
If people refuse to look at you in a new light and they can only see you for what you were, only see you for the mistakes you’ve made, if they don’t realize that you are not your mistakes, then they have to go.
If I’ve learned one lesson from all that’s happened to me, it’s that there is no such thing as the biggest mistake of your existence. There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.
The main thing in life is not to be afraid to be human.
How to Leave the Past Behind
When you’re feeling overwhelmed with your sadness and loss, it’s hard to believe that your life will ever change, or you’ll ever be able to smile or laugh again. But the truth is you will – it won’t always be this bad – and there are things you can do help move on with your life:
1. Decide to face your pain. An unresolved past never really goes away. You may think you have buried your anger and pain but the hurt is still there and it will surface later on. If you don’t face what happened, and the feelings it unleashed, you will end up being ruled by your subconscious mind. So try and find the courage to revisit all the pain.
2. Accept there’s nothing you can do to change the past. What’s happened has happened, and what’s done is done. There’s nothing you can do to turn back the hands of time, or to rewrite the story so the ending’s happier. But you can change how you think, and you can start over again, and build a different future that’s not poisoned by the past.
3. Be grateful for the good times. There’s usually something good that you can be thankful for. You don’t have to pretend that everything was bad – or write off any good times and happy memories.
4. Consciously let go and set your focus on the future - Don’t let the baggage, or the failures of the past, affect your identity or self esteem. You are NOT what you did, or how you acted previously. You’re not just a product of what happened to you. You are valuable, unique and you have so much to give. You’re the author of your future; you control your destiny.
5. Remove your past from your future. We all have a tendency to think that the past will morph into our future – and become our lot in life. But that doesn’t have to happen. The future’s a blank page. You can change your expectations – and work towards those goals. Instead, look hard for the exceptions – the times when things went right – and notice what you did that resulted in success. You still have those same strengths, skills and great qualities.
6. Be realistic and take small steps at first. You can’t snap your fingers - and find that life has changed. Accept it will take time, and you will still have some bad days – but if you keep on going then the past will lose its grip.
I lay for a long time in silence, staring at the ceiling. Was my life always to be like this? I wondered. Was it going to go, forever, in an instant, from sunshine to shadow? From pandemonium to loneliness?
Hurt people hurt people. That’s how pain patterns gets passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.
Things come apart so easily when they’ve been held together with lies.
People tend to complicate their lives, as if living weren’t already complicated enough.
Life needed a fast forward button - because there were days you just didn’t want to live through, not again.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
How to Survive when Bad Things Happen
1. Try to switch your emotions to neutral so you can think more clearly, and do what’s best for you.
2. Ask “how” not “why”. Just for the moment, keep your focus on the challenge, and the steps you need to take to climb out of the pit. Often, by doing one small thing can start to turn things round.
3. Look for the good things, and the lessons you can learn. It will help you be resourceful, and will change your attitude.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Other people understand what it’s like to get bad news. They know it “knocks you sideways”, and it saps your energy.
5. Try and see it as a temporary experience. Life is always changing, and bad things pass in time.
6. Don’t take it personally. We all experience crises, disappointments and tough times. It just means that you’re human – you’re not being singled out!
