You think you know what you want and what you deserve. You preach to yourself, "I'm not going to put up with *fill in blank behavior*" or, "If I was ever treated like that I wouldn't put up with it." But you still put up with the way people act and how they treat you because, well ... you're comfortable.
You aren't willing to lose people in your life. You start to think, "Oh no, it's fine, he barely hit me; he was joking around anyway or it was an accident." Or when your friends don't support you with your endeavors, make cruel and nasty comments at you just to tear you down, even if you think their comments are just the truth and they're trying to help you — they aren't.
Don't ever give anybody the power to define you, alter who you are or destroy you.
No one needs toxic people at any point in their life. You need a support system. People in your life that will be there in a heartbeat, people that won't hurt you or be upset with you regularly.
Friends who will come to your house in the middle of the night just to make sure you made it home OK. Friends who comfort you when you've had a bad day or a bad week. Friends who bring you tacos and doughnuts when you need comfort food.
You need good people, not toxic.
You can tell yourself you deserve better or that people will change. But those are just lies you tell yourself to get by, trying to see the good in the people in your life even if they are weighing you down.
Your value doesn't decrease based on someone's inability to see your worth.
You learn your worth from experience. You learn it from getting treated like trash and finding your way through life. But to learn from it, you need to escape the bad people or things dragging you down. It is how you learn your self-worth. By doing, not saying. Then gradually, you will start your ascending battle of learning your worth.
Through trial and error, heartbreak after heartbreak, years later you'll learn exactly what you deserve to be treated like as a person.
You'll look back at your past and laugh at the simple choices you had but what seemed like the hardest decisions of your life. You'll realize that there are great people in this world and great people who are a part of your life. You'll realize how much you deserve and more.
All of those decisions, the learning decisions, will have brought you to what you are today. You'll be happy, and you'll be you.