22 Lessons You Deserve To Learn By 22

1. I have spent so much time being intimidated by so many people. In the end, none of them were worth it.

2. Loving yourself into health will always be more satisfying than depriving yourself into a smaller pant size.

3. It will take a lot of rejection for you to not take rejection personally. It never is personal, by the way, even when it really feels like it is.

4. You are officially old enough to know that you can’t guilt yourself into doing anything under the guise of willpower.

5. You are also old enough to know that while some things are understood, it can still take a while for them to be realized. This is okay. You’re not in a rush.

6. You will never stop learning. You will never know it all.

7. Your experiences, opinions, and knowledge provide you a lens through which you view the world. A lens. This does not mean you are the be all and end all wealth of wisdom or are the “most woke.” It means that you have a specific way of seeing things because of how you grew up. If we could all embrace this, we would learn so much more from each other.

8. A lot of freedom comes masked as discipline and responsibility. The more you discipline yourself and the more responsibilities you take on, the more freedom you will have.

9. Who you were in college is as important as who you were in high school. It’s only as relevant as it is current.

10. Struggling can be the greatest unwanted gift you’ll ever receive. You will learn invaluable things that you would not be able to learn had things been easy.

11. Terrible and selfish people can be the greatest unwanted companions you’ll ever have. They will teach you certain things about yourself and the world that can’t be taught by kindness alone.

12. Your parents are probably right.

13. When you feel yourself justifying or defending something/someone/yourself to another, you either need to evaluate your relationship with that something/someone/yourself, or the person in question. Nothing you know in your heart worth keeping requires justification. Deep down, you know that too.

14. Chances are, you aren’t mad at the person who left you behind. You’re just mad that you were left behind. It’s life, and it doesn’t make those people bad people.

15. If you used to enjoy doing something for yourself and you find that you hate it all of a sudden, it’s because somewhere down the line, you stopped doing it for yourself.

16. Conventionally beautiful people do not have their lives together any more than the rest of us. This seems like a “duh” point, but I think we all often fall into this false belief.

17. Just because someone is conventionally beautiful, does not mean they are a cold-hearted airhead. This is such an outdated concept that we still cling to out of comfort and insecurity.

18. Demonizing one group or side will never unite it with its counterpart.

19. We live in a world that mass produces everything. It’s okay to be a little different.

20. Growing pains are nothing compared to outgrowing pains.

21. You will never make someone see their worth. They have to do that themselves.

22. No one will make you see your worth. You get to do that yourself.