This is Life

"This is life. People will screw you over. You’ll fight with your family. You’ll witness things that will change you forever. You’ll blame new lovers for things old lovers did. You’ll lose best friends you thought would always be there. You’ll come to realize that everyone has a past. You’ll cry, you’ll laugh, and you’ll embarrass yourself. But then, you’ll find your very own moment where none of that matters; where you can sit back and realize that stuff happens to the people who can handle it and that this is who you are, and that no one should want to change you, including yourself."

A friend of mine said this to me once...
And at the time I didn't believe them, but the more I think about it now the more I realize how right they are.
Strangers, friends and family alike will use you to get where they need to go and what they want. Co-workers and acquaintances, family and friends, will try to pull you down when you make one little mistake, but you have to keep from letting them get to you. You have to be yourself and keep holding yourself up and moving forward, one step at a time.

You won't always see eye-to-eye with your parents or your siblings, but you will never be able to stop loving them because they are blood. I say this because after almost a decade of hating each other and antagonizing each other, my mother and I finally turned over a new leaf and began a new chapter where we are now friends. We still have some work to do, as do my brother and I, but so far so good.

You will watch the news and see things you never thought you ever would, things you will never begin to understand, and they will shape the way you think forever. It will change the way you see the world, and the people in it in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. In my lifetime I've seen the fall of the Twin Towers, the aftermath of hurricanes and tsunamis, murder of innocent people in places like Sandy Hook, and now the bombing of the Boston Marathon. I have started to wonder why I even bother to pick up the newspaper or turn on the news anymore. It seems like all we ever hear about are the negative things in the world nowadays and it gives us the perspective that everything in the world has fallen into chaos. There would still be hope if just every once in a while the papers would release something with a positive spin to prove there is still good in the world.

You will fight with the ones you love and you will make mistakes, but most of all, the mistakes others make will shape how you see romantic relationships down the road. You will assume the worst because of something others did wrong before, and it will affect how you see others in your future. The people who wronged you in your past will make the others who slip up in the future seem like they have done much bigger things wrong than they really have.

The people in your life will come and go. They will do things you will love them for, and they will do things that you will hate them for. You never know why someone came into your life until after they leave, or until after you slam the door in their face. The people who hold you up when you are weak can only hold you so long unless you decide to start holding yourself up as well at some point.

Eventually you will find out that just like you, every single person on this planet has lived through a world of things. Everyone has, or will have, a time or two of weakness, a time of great strength, and a times of great sadness and of happiness. Everyone will have a time when the ends barely meet, when they can barely pay their own way, and they feel overwhelmed by the fact that they have so much more on their plate than they can handle. These are the times we feel like there aren't enough hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a month, and months in a year to get all the things we want and need to do done. Some people, like myself now, work great under that pressure, but others, like my former self, get to a point where they have so much to do and not enough time to do it that they decide not to do any of it. And just like you, everyone has made mistakes...

Life is about having fun, so by all means, please laugh and go make a fool of yourself if it suits you every once in a while. The more you get out there the more fun you will have.

As for realizing everyone has a past, this was the biggest one for me personally. This portion of my friends words hit me particularly hard recently. After having met the guy every girl wishes she could find, I slowly found out that I was not the only person who had rebuilt myself, who had struggled to become what I was (the person he had become interested in).