14 Hard Lessons Learned/Learning

Here are some of the lessons life is teaching and taught me that I want to share. The hope is that the lessons I have learned and are learning will help someone to not feel alone and to keep going. Here are the 14 hard lessons I have learned and are learning so far in my life.

1. Just because a person appears to be okay around other people doesn’t mean they’re really okay.
   
   It’s easy to say okay than admitting you are experiencing depression, anxiety, trauma, etc. I know I am guilty of this in my life. I am a person who experiences depression, but I have learned to act like nothing is wrong and keep up appearances. I had learned to go into autopilot mode to seem okay. The problem is you can say you’re okay, and it not be true, but it doesn’t take away from what you’re really feeling.

2. If you are being or been abused, tell someone you know that cares about you.
   
   For a long time, I thought that I needed to be strong and not show weakness. What I learned is that if you don’t deal with what happened, it will hold you back from living. Then one day, you will wake up and realize that you have missed out on so much time. Take it from me; it’s not worth it from my experience.

3. Being prideful doesn’t get you the help that you need. It just leaves you more stressed.
   
   For a long time, I was prideful about my journey and everything that I have gone through. I have said a lot of times in my life I am okay and wouldn’t admit things that happened to me because I was afraid it would mess up the image that I created for myself. I have believed for the longest time that admitting those things would take away my value. The truth is holding on to those things just made me feel more stressed because I wasn’t dealing with my problem, which made it hard to get the help that I needed.

4. Just because everything didn’t line up the way that you thought it should be doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It just means your path didn’t line up the way God intended it to be.
   
   It is hard to have a dream or an idea of who you should be at a certain point in your life, but it doesn’t mean you’re a failure because it hasn’t happened yet. Just keep working through it, and everything will work out the way it is supposed to be.

5. Put yourself out there!
   
   I never really knew what I could do until I tried something new. I think the whole point of life is moving out of your comfort zone. So every time you get too comfortable, it means you have to raise the bar again and push yourself to do something that you thought was impossible. When you do raise the bar, it will help you to grow as a person.

6. Don’t ever be afraid to go after something you feel you were meant to do in life. It might lead you to where you’re supposed to be.
   
   For a long time in my life, I went after the things that I thought other people thought that I should do, but what I learned was that I was more miserable. I was afraid of hurting the people in my life because I didn’t do what other people wanted me to do. The truth is I was hurting myself by trying to be someone that I am not. It ended up making me resentful of my life because I wasn’t living, I was just existing.

7. The way that other people perceive you doesn’t compare to the way that you see yourself. So it’s important to love yourself and give yourself some grace.
   
   This is definitely a lesson that I am still working on. Often, it is easy to get caught up in the way that other people see you, but the truth is the way that other people see you don’t matter as much as we might think. We have to live with ourselves, so it’s important to respect ourselves by loving ourselves. I am at the beginning of this lesson and trying to start practicing it so I can eventually live it.

8. Your value is not determined by people liking or disliking you.
   
   My mom has always told me, “we are not in this world for likes and dislikes.” It has taken me a long time to understand that principle. Now I am working on accepting it because it is true. We were created and born for a specific purpose before we understood people liking or disliking us. It is important to fulfill that purpose.

9. No person has the answer to who you are supposed to be.
   
   For most of my life, I have made decisions based on what other people thought I should do. The truth is it is a miserable feeling to suppress yourself. Sometimes you will eventually explode on another person because you can not hide the real you forever, and why should you? You were created the way you are for a reason, so embrace it! If you need direction, it’s important to seek it from God.

10. If you put too much emphasis on another person’s happiness, you will lose your identity.
    
    When I was in high school, I was “friends” with a girl I cared about like a sister. The problem was I cared more about her happiness than my well-being. It had gotten to the point that I didn’t know myself anymore, which isn’t a friendship. It’s taken a while, but I know now a friend is someone who encourages you to grow, who is supportive, and doesn’t require you to care more about them than yourself.

11. If you always run from your problems, they will be waiting for you at the next destination.
    
    The hardest lesson for me to learn in life is the importance of dealing with my problems instead of running from them. It’s easier for me to get wrapped up in the lives of people who are close to me that I forget that I have things that I need to work on to stay healthy.

12. It is okay to change.
    
    For a long time, I thought it was wrong to change. One reason is that I felt like I didn’t want people to believe that something was going on with me and make the assumption that I needed an outside factor to change my behavior. The other reason was that I felt like I had to live the way that other people saw me even if that is not the real me. I thought that I must stay the way that the people who have left saw me to fulfill their view of who I am. What I learned was people come, and people go, but you have to stay true to yourself by respecting yourself. Trying to become a better version of yourself or grow as a person requires you to change, and it is okay to want that for yourself.

13. It is okay to be misunderstood.
    
    I thought it was important to be understood by people than to be myself. A lot of things I say people do not understand in my life, and I have come to accept that it might not have been for that person to understand. I think the right person who was supposed to hear what I’m saying will understand.
    
    
14. There are genuinely caring people in the world. You just have to accept it even when some people have hurt you.
    
    It has been hard for me to accept this lesson. I thought and still think something is wrong with me and incapable of receiving care and love. By not accepting that there are caring people, I feel even more lonely and not part of my community. Acknowledging this principle has started to change the way I think about people in my life.