What life lessons have you had to learn the hard way?

19 comments

1. As a neurodivergent person, the hardest thing I learned is that everyone will be kind, accommodating and willing to hold your hand until you turn 18. After that, it’s, “you’re an adult and you should be able to handle this by now.”

   It literally goes from one extreme to the other with almost no transitional period.

2. Be careful what secrets you share with someone even if you trust them with your life. Sometimes the people you trust the most will betray you the hardest.

3. You can’t save another person. (Sigh. If only I could….)

4. The most important person to yourself is yourself!

5. To listen and act on my instinct, don’t let my head talk me into things that don’t feel right.

6. Learning to say no and understanding my own boundaries :/

7. When you combine doubt and discouragement you get hopelessness. It makes someone do nothing but feel sorry for themselves. Nothing kills someone faster than hopelessness.

8. If a guy says he’s going to break up with his girlfriend for you, he’s probably lying

9. People will take advantage of your kindness. Givers must set limits because takers never will.

10. Nobody is going to rescue you. You have to do that yourself.

11. Some people are just not serious. They can make whole yearslong future plans and they don’t actually intend to do anything to make those plans happen. They might mean it in the moment but they don’t think it’s important to mean it for real if you say it out loud, or they think everybody makes fun, idealistic goals and changes their mind about them later.

    These types of people can be entertaining and charming friends, but you can’t rely on them to do what they said they would do, and you can’t expect them to change. It’s a problem of a fundamentally different worldview, not of a slight misunderstanding.

    I don’t think of myself as, like, a rigid human being. But I think I must actually be to some degree more rigid and more serious than most people are, because I’ve encountered this divergence in my thinking from others more often than I ever expected to.

12. Low self-esteem can only be solved by learning to love and value yourself. If you look for external validation to lift your self-esteem, you will be disappointed.

13. the people you work with are generally not your friends, and never *ever* add them on social media. and don’t *EVER* trust *anyone* in HR. they are all snakes.

14. Life is worth living, even if it’s really hard at a particular moment. It can be worth the fight.

15. Never trust a woman

16. If you pour emotional or financial bandwidth into a human, there’s no social contract for reciprocation, so ensure you’re happy to give it as a gift with no expectations back.

17. People don’t change. If someone doesn’t do house chores, they’re not gonna start because you move in together, regardless of what they promise.

18. No good deed goes unpunished.

19. If you don’t process your trauma properly it will indeed, like everyone warned, catch up with you at some point lol