As strong as your weakest point

Dear Friend,

The day started out well. I could tell by the smile playing on your lips. Even though it was small, the spark in your eyes showed that it was genuine. You’ve been busy, engaged with life enough to forget your pain. But then you met someone who said something, and whatever dam that has been keeping the sadness at bay broke and your feelings gushed back to overwhelm you.

You need to remember that you are as strong as your weakest point. And your weakest point is that you want everybody to like you. But we live on planet Earth with human beings who have on average a hundred billion neurons in their brains. How these neurons connect with each other depends on a person’s individual experience in life, and that results in people having traits spanning the entire spectrum. So start from the position of knowing that not everybody will like you and not everybody will agree with you in everything and not everybody has your good interests at heart, but that’s okay.

And because there will be different people in your life, some of them would be toxic and they would say things out of ignorance and insensitivity that would cause you immense sorrow. It’s easy to say that you will avoid them, but avoiding them is not always feasible because sometimes relationships are more complicated than they seem. So the easiest thing to do is put up boundaries. Define rules pertaining to every relationship; how vulnerable you’ll allow yourself to be around them, how much time you will spend with them, what areas of your life you will allow them to advice you about, and what areas are off-limit, what topics to discuss with them and what are your expectations of them.

The thing is, no one – absolutely no one – has the right to take your happiness away, especially when you don’t have much of it to start with.

So never give someone that kind of power.