For me, growing up, I felt like there was something fatally and tragically flawed in my nature and that it was my duty to try to avoid falling for that vice.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Acting in anger and hatred throughout my life, I frequently precipitated what I feared most, the loss of friendships and the need to rely upon the very people I'd abused.
For me, there is a guiding compass that just lives inside of me. Every time I've gone against it, something bad has happened. As long as I stay in line and honor it, it has really been life changing.
It's been one of the most painful things I've ever been through in my whole life: trying to understand the degree to which behaviors that I thought were totally appropriate were destructive.
It took me realizing that a broken heart has never actually killed anyone to find the courage to ask for what I want, in just about every situation. That was part of my own growing up.
I had lost a clear sense of the vision and values instilled in me as a child and was no longer driven by any mission or passion. I made the difficult decision to pull back from the noise of my life and reinvent the way I was living and leading.
As a teenager, I put a lot of pressure on myself, and a lot of that, for me, was about finding a moral high ground. As I've grown up, I've decided to abandon that because it made me judgmental and also stressed me out.
When I'm trusting and being myself as fully as possible, everything in my life reflects this by falling into place easily, often miraculously.
In a funny way, when things went wrong in my life - and it is my fault that they went wrong, it is not anyone else's fault - and all the glittering outside things were taken away, I was left with the things of most value.
I would like to think that as a result of not just my own experiences, but at least being empathetic and compassionate about other people's experiences and plights and tragedies, that I am affected by it and learn from it.
Growing up, I was not used to good things happening to me.
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