I think this is something we all know, but still, it is always good to mention it. As human beings we have that little tendency to want to please others or at least it is something that I always had in mind, I really liked to make others happy: friends, family.... And many times that cost me a little bit of my happiness, or not, let's put it another way, many times that causes me discomfort. Over the years I understood that we cannot make other people happy if we are not happy ourselves; and we cannot (nor should we) ignore our feelings or what we want to do, just because other people expect the opposite. It is well said that the world is not a wish fulfillment factory; and neither are you as a person. With this I don't mean that you can't have empathy, but I do say that you should know when your empathy ends and your happiness begins.

Since I was a little girl I was always an advocate of "If you want something to go well, do it yourself".... And I didn't realize how harmful this behavior was until I grew up and realized that I can't carry all the responsibilities of everything by myself, because it's not right, it's exhausting, it's sad and it's delusional. At the end of the day, common projects are just that, something in COMMON and everyone involved should want it as much as you do. Besides taking control of everything is never possible, in life there are thousands of things that are out of our control and we can't do anything to change that, you can't control the climate or the weather, you can't control people's attitudes or actions, you can only control your reaction to them, and that's what I focus on doing.

As human beings, making mistakes is part of our nature. Failing, too. Beating ourselves up mentally every time something doesn't go right is another way of wearing ourselves out. The worst part is to live going over and over what could have been, what we could have done at that moment and thinking about how we would do things differently if magically time would go backwards, meanwhile, that same time that you expect to go backwards, will keep moving forward and you are still stuck, punishing yourself, without growing, without learning, without advancing. That is why I feel that destructive self-criticism is something we must learn to let go of little by little, believe me I am striving for it.

I always refused to believe that our friendships define us. But the truth is that in a way it is so, each one of us has our own personality (or should have) but, with time you also adapt to those around you and assume similar habits and thoughts. Throughout my short life I have had mentally poor friends, who did not want to demand a better life for themselves even if they had the possibilities, it was simply a "No thanks, I will not progress" and when they saw me trying, instead of supporting me, they tried to demotivate me. The same thing has happened to me with pessimistic friends, people who preferred to drown in a glass that didn't even have water. I am a true believer that your decisions are what shape your reality, if you make good decisions, you get good results, if you make bad decisions, it's up to you to learn from them and try to make better ones... But what happens when you just prefer to complain and stay stuck? I learned that sometimes you have to be a "bad friend" because you need to take care of yourself. It's like I mentioned above, you have to know the limit of your empathy, of your love for others. The same happens when your friends are people who like to surround themselves with bad vibes, gossip or envy, you will always be in the middle of that kind of stuff, and that, it wears you down.