I learned the hard way that I cannot always count on others to respect my feelings, even if I respect theirs. Being a good person doesn’t guarantee that others will be good people, too. You only have control over yourself and how you choose to be as a person. As for others, you can only choose to accept them or walk away.

It’s incredible how enlightening some encounters turn out to be. It seems like when you least expect it, you find someone that you’ve always been looking for. Someone who sees something in you that you’ve never seen in yourself, something that you didn’t even know was there.
At times we get uncomfortable in our skin, it starts to itch, and the version of us we were once accustomed to no longer feels acceptable. We’re forced to change into a new person or self destruct, because living as a person we no longer feel comfortable with seems like the worst possible option.

But sometimes the change we need isn’t in ourselves, it’s external. We need someone to look at us under a new light. Someone that sees our future, what we’ve been striving to be for years, the version of us we never knew how to become.
So when your skin starts to itch, and you just have to get out, self reflect. It’s never a bad thing, it leads to self discovery and sometimes even enlightenment. But if all else fails, just find a new mirror. Because at times, what you see looking back at you from that glass isn’t the prettiest thing, but what someone else envisions in you, could brighten the world.

I dated a guy in high school for a while and I think that was, in a way, first love-ish. But then there’s the first time that you love someone more than you’ve ever loved anything, ever. That’s a different thing. Then there’s the time after that where you feel like you’ve loved a man more than anyone you ever loved in your life and that must be your first love because that must be the only time you’ve ever felt that kind of love. I think your life is full of first loves because every time you love someone new, you love them in a different way.

Don’t rely on someone else for your happiness and self worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can’t love and respect yourself - no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are - completely; the good and the bad - and make changes as you see fit - not because you think someone else wants you to be different.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions—predigested books and ideas, marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short…and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”.