For the past 11 years of my life, I have had a best friend who continuously told me, "You deserve better than that" or "You're worth more than that." For the first time in my life, I am starting to believe and finally get it... Now that we are 10 hours apart.
You are worth more than the circumstances in the moment. The boys, money, grades, weight—none of those define who you are. And this has been the hardest thing for me to get through my head.
I have always judged my happiness based on the things that were going on around me, which is why I spent most of my teenage years being unhappy and ungrateful. But now at age 19, I have finally began to understand what my best friend had been talking about all this time.
I always noticed that some of the people around me could be positive even in the worst situations, and I never got it. How are you happy when your boyfriend is fighting with you all the time? How are you happy when you're bigger than the girl standing next to you? How are you happy when you aren't getting the best grades in the class? But here I am—I'm (slowly) starting to be that person.
I get it now. Being happy comes solely in the way you feel about yourself and the way that you handle the situations in your life. It truly has nothing to do with anyone else or any of those things that you're dealing with right now. If you know that you are more than the way he's treating you, more than the number on the scale or the grade on that test, nothing can make you feel less. Once you decide that you are worth being here, and worth the world (which you are) nothing will change that.
Stop letting the negative people in this world crush you, and instead, lift yourself up. Let the positive people and things lift you up, but whatever you do, do not feed into the negative. There will be people that spend their days trying to drag you down, grades that will make you feel like you know nothing and some days, you will wake up feeling down. But learn to overlook these small "for now" moments, and love yourself regardless of them all.
You are worth it. You are loved. You must love yourself. And those are the three things that I wish I had learned before I was almost 20. Live for yourself and loving yourself, and everything else will come.
