Train yourself to not abandon yourself

I have seen this in abundance. People tolerate misery. They invite it, they sit with it, they don’t like it, and then they don’t cut it off. Because they’re comfortable.

Your cut-off game needs to be strong.

If you live a healthy lifestyle, you have 70–100 years. It may seem like a lot, but life has a way of going by fast. Days are slow, but years go by within a blink. Are you sure you want to spend your life being miserable?

Difficult people, failures, heartbreaks, and wrong turns don’t block our purpose; they help reveal it. The relationship that breaks your heart may teach you your standards. The bad job may show you what work you actually want. The wrong friendship may teach you boundaries. Not everything painful is an obstacle. Sometimes it’s part of the path.

That being said, continuing to stay and not change anything due to negligence will tend to block you from your purpose, to block you from yourself. You need to realise who you are, what you stand for, what your purpose and goals are. And you always need to check in with yourself. Do that to ask yourself if the people around you, the situation, and the environment you’re in allow you to be yourself, to grow, and to be at peace. If it doesn’t, cut it off, move, get out. If it can’t be done immediately, start planning on leaving. Do not get attached to the wrong things. Let go. You will be fine.

Are you aware of how you are controlled? How your mind is controlled through fear?

Think about how you’ve been raised. Your parents, even your teachers, often disciplined you with fear. Respect was taught with fear. Lessons, behaviours, routines, everything was taught to you through fear. And maybe it is a good thing. Maybe now you brush your teeth every morning because, if you hadn’t, your mom would have yelled at you. I’m not here to delve into your childhood or preach anything about parenting. I’m just saying that’s how most of us grew up.

And maybe, looking at that, it’s safe to assume that in some way or another we’ve learned to be afraid of certain things, and fear controls us. Fear of shame, fear of not being good enough, fear of being alone, and so on.

But we should not let fear lead our lives. Fear is good for survival. But that’s it.

Do you want to survive, or do you want to live?

Detachment does not have to be scary.

What some people also tend to do is they look at detachment and take it to an extreme. Suddenly they don’t care at all, but in the process, they end up being surrounded by people, by things that aren’t good for them. They just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

That is negligence, not detachment.

When you look at detachment, you need to know one thing. It’s powerful, and it should be used for your good. Don’t just not care. Don’t care about the things or the people that aren’t good for you. In all honesty, nothing lasts for life. And change is the only constant. Yet people are so uncomfortable with the only thing they can know for sure: that there is absolutely no constant.

The only lifelong relationship you will have is the one with yourself. All of your decisions, your focus, your routine, everything should reflect that.

The fear of shame and being alone makes us want to always surround ourselves with people, without checking in with ourselves if they are good for us or not. Eventually, we have to learn to let go of people or situations that don’t bring out the best in us.

Train yourself to always be there for you.

How do you do that? I suppose the first step is finding comfort in your solitude. Being fine with being by yourself. Having immense trust in yourself. This is so important. And you can achieve it by spending more time with yourself intentionally. Take yourself out. Go on a walk. Have a movie night by yourself. Cook something cool for yourself. There are so many ways by which you can enjoy your own company.

We avoid ourselves so much. We avoid our thoughts so much. We drown ourselves in the noise: work, friends, brain-rot reels. But if you want to genuinely feel okay and not like you might have panic attacks every time someone leaves or something changes, then you need to work on that.

My first point to this would be that you could do this by letting yourself get bored. Let yourself think and check up on yourself. So many times, we don’t even recognize our unhappy state, and before you know it, you are in a situation you never wanted to be in, and you feel like you don’t know yourself anymore.

Other than letting yourself get bored, my second point is that you could sit down and journal. And I don’t think it matters if you are someone who writes or not. If you are human, you have emotions, and you can express them. Express your thoughts and emotions to yourself. Confess to yourself. You might surprise yourself.

The third thing that you could do is so simple but so important. You need to constantly tell yourself that you are going to be okay. You need to write it down, say it to yourself, or even say it in your mind. It’s not magic. It’s science. Saying this and knowing this subconsciously helps you to self-regulate. This might sound silly, but imagine going through a bad day. At the end of the day, wouldn’t you want someone to be there for you, telling you it’s going to be okay? Think for a second: why can you not be that person for yourself? For every little to big thing that happens, good or bad, does it hurt to let yourself know that you are good, that you are going to be okay no matter what? Trust me, it helps.

Treat yourself like you would treat someone you love. The answer is that simple. Get familiar with yourself.

Train yourself to always be there for you. Trust yourself. Be there for yourself. The rest becomes a lot easier when you stop abandoning the one person who will be with you for life.