I didn’t pull these rules from a self-help book or the latest podcast. I earned them the slow way, through therapy, quiet mornings, painful mistakes, and years spent trying to become a better human being. Nobody hands you a manual for being human.
But if someone had handed me these five rules twenty years ago, I might have spared myself a great deal of unnecessary suffering.
1. Let It Go
Not everything deserves your energy.
This one took me years to get to, with the help of therapy and my own hard focus. I spent most of my life carrying bottled up anger, resentment, and pain from the past, and what I finally learned is that the weight of carrying it is far greater than the weightlessness of letting it go. Give your energy to something more worthwhile, something or someone that deserves it. Something or someone that makes you a better human. The rest can stay where you dropped it.
2. Care Less About What Others Think
Live by YOUR values, not other people’s approval.
There is nothing more confusing and exhausting than trying to live up to the expectations of others. What you see on social media, on television, and in fiction is all projection, someone painting a picture of what life is supposed to look like. It does not hold true to reality. And here’s the part that took me too long to figure out: most of the people whose opinions you’re worried about aren’t thinking about you at all. They’re too busy worrying about what everyone else thinks of them. We waste years performing for an audience that isn’t watching. Once that sinks in, it’s strangely freeing.
3. Give It Time
Clarity, healing, and growth rarely happen overnight.
It took time to get to what happened, and it will take time to repair. Or think of it this way: it took years to become who you are today, for better and worse. It will take time to become someone different. We want healing to work like a fever, break in the night and gone by morning. It doesn’t. It works more like a garden, slow and unglamorous and mostly invisible, until one day you notice something growing where there used to be nothing. Be as patient with yourself as you would be with anything else worth building.
4. Don’t Compare Yourself to Others
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday.
That’s the only comparison that’s fair, because it’s the only one where both people started in the same place. Someone else’s chapter twenty will always make your chapter three look like failure. It isn’t failure. It’s just earlier in the book, and you have no idea what their first nineteen chapters cost them.
5. Smile
The world is heavy enough. Don’t carry every burden as your own.
This isn’t about pretending everything is fine, and it sure isn’t about plastering on a grin while the house burns down. It’s about refusing to let everything that’s wrong take up permanent residence in you. Some days a smile is the best thing you can offer the world. Offer it anyway. Joy is an act of quiet rebellion.
None of these rules are complicated. That’s the point. The hard part was never understanding them. The hard part is living them, one ordinary day at a time. Start with one. Give it time. Compare yourself only to yesterday.
Because most people aren’t living. They’re surviving. These five rules are how I keep trying to do the former.
~ DAK
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