Do you have someone in your life who you can’t avoid who makes your life just a little harder? Maybe it’s your roommate, someone in your family, or one of your friend’s friends. This is the year of looking within yourself, discovering why they bother you so much, and standing up for yourself once and for all!
I’ve seen this happen over and over, I’ve seen it go horribly wrong, and I’ve seen it be the best decision of someone’s life. Here’s the determining factor: choosing whether this will be a growth experience for you or just letting it go.
When someone you can’t avoid is regularly making you anxious, uncomfortable and feel worse about yourself, oftentimes you can choose to power through your interactions with them and count down the days until they end. The transformative way, though, is to choose to examine why your relationship with them is so challenging and fundamentally change it, ultimately salvaging your mental health.
A lot of times your antihero bothers you, because they bring out one of your deepest insecurities, like they show a quality that you have that embarasses you or they display a behavior you envy. They essentially do something you wish you could but you don’t feel like you are capable of.
For instance, if you’re insecure about how you can be a bit selfish at times, and you see someone do it without a second thought, you may start to resent it without realizing why. If you feel the need to constantly apologize and you see someone display the opposite: saying exactly what they think and feel with no apologies, you may feel a deep jealousy that bleeds into disliking the person.
So often in college we come across these people, we worry that if we told them how we truly felt, they’d hate us forever and our relationship would be forever severed. Let’s get rid of that idea! The people who are supposed to be in your life will stay in your life no matter what. Let’s be real with ourselves about who we’re striving to be, and let’s be real with everyone around us about how they’re contributing to our goals.
Life can be full of tiptoeing, social anxiety and worrying about where you stand with people – let’s get rid of some of that. If there are people who always leave you feeling unworthy and like you’re doubting yourself, give them less energy this year. It is almost never completely on you, it is more likely in your head or on the other person for making you feel uneasy. That is a freeing feeling, the idea that you can be yourself without having to carefully plan each word with the right people surrounding you. Maybe you’ll lose some people along the way (or not be as close), but the bonds that remain will be the strongest of your life.