Lessons Learned

One of the biggest most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my 20’s (recently I must admit) is that you don’t have to convince another person of their actions and the consequences of them. Basically you can’t change who a person is. To elaborate, someone may have done something to hurt or offend or annoy you etc. and you can sit all day long and try to convince them of these actions and their effects but honestly if it’s a habit of theirs they’ll probably never get it.

The takeaway is that it’s not about changing THEM but about changing how it affects YOU. Maybe you need to distance yourself from the person, or try to understand why they do what they do and gain some empathy. But as long as you feel the need to cling onto the fact of making them come to some sort of revelation and stop their actions, you’ll probably feel frustrated forever. And in the end, that only affects you and not the other person. When you think about it, you’re kind of asking the person to not be who they are and maybe the problem is that you don’t like who they are and that’s ok, you don’t have to. It doesn’t mean they’re a bad person or that your mean.

Truth is you’re not going to like everyone you encounter and you can like/love someone for years and time can change all that for you. People grow apart and people change, that is normal. And some people don’t change while you have moved lightyears ahead.

I think the older you get the more this saying holds true: “Some people are in your life for a reason, some people are in your life for a season, and some people are in your life for a lifetime.” It’s not for the other person to know which they are, that is up to you and how the cards unfold.

And maybe the other person will never understand their actions but guess what? Even if it’s frustrating, when it comes down to it, their lack of understanding truly does not affect you and sometimes the best thing you can do for both parties is to move on.

So I guess what I really learned is knowing the things and people to hold to and the things to let go and move on from which is much harder to decipher then it sounds.