Just So You Know, Being Broken Doesn’t Excuse You From Breaking Others

You are allowed to be broken.

You are allowed to be broken, but you aren’t allowed to break other people’s hope. You’re allowed to be jealous, but you aren’t allowed to be mean. You’re allowed to feel behind, but you aren’t allowed to shrug off other people’s accomplishments. You are allowed to be tired, but you aren’t allowed to tell other people to slow down.

Someone else’s failure isn’t a shadow on your success. Someone else’s happiness doesn’t invalidate your pain. Someone else’s beauty doesn’t make you unattractive. Someone else’s words don’t have to mean a thing.

When you realize that what other people say about you is a projection of how they see themselves, you’ll never worry about it again. When you realize that the way you speak about other people is a projection of how you feel about yourself, you’ll learn everything you need to know about what you need to do with your life.

The saying goes: things are not as they are, they are as we are.

And once you realize that you love in other people what you love in yourself, you hate in other people what you can’t see in yourself, you envy in other people what you won’t allow yourself, and you judge in other people what you secretly see in yourself… you’ll understand that you’re not being punished by other people’s successes. You’re being shown where it is you need to grow, how it is you need to change.

You’re not less blessed than someone because you don’t have what they have. You might just be less convinced that you deserve it.

Being broken for a little bit? It won’t ruin your life. But breaking other people – with your words, your judgments, your actions towards them – that will. You’re allowed to not feel well. But if you are constantly miserable, unproductive and rude, you can’t then blame others for why you got fired, or why you’re alone on a Friday night.

The thing about this generation is that people are really quick to point out what’s wrong in the world, and very slow to realize how they are contributing to the problems in their own lives. If something is affecting you in a significant way – even if it wasn’t your fault – it is your problem.

And if, like everyone else, your problem is that you seem to have an issue with everyone and everything around you, perhaps the common denominator is you. And perhaps you might want to check yourself, because a bad month will pass. A bad year will, too. But when you burn bridges and end friendships and make judgmental statements about other people, those things don’t fade so easily.

At the end of the day, continue to break others is how you keep your own brokenness alive.