Rising from the Ashes: 6 Lessons to Learn from Personal Setbacks

 

We all go through it. We’re on top of the world one minute and down and out the next.

We are lost, alone, and have no hope.

Pain can last for a few days, a few weeks, or even a few months.

But it is possible to pick yourself up from the ashes with grace and find a new life.

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In September 2020, I will have been out of high school for a year.

Since I graduated, three years will have gone by. In those 3 years, I’ve had the best times of my life and the worst times of my life.

At this point, it’s all just the way things are, and I don’t regret how things have changed.

It’s hard to believe that in just over 2 years, my old life went away and a new one in a new city grew out of the ashes.

I did not choose to fall. I didn’t want to fail or hurt. Instead, I was given a bad hand and had to play by the rules.

No matter how or why it happened, I had two options: I could sit around and feel sorry for myself, or I could go out and find out something new about myself.

The second one was what helped me grow up and become more mature.

Here are six things I’ve learned on my journey.

Some of these are hard to learn, and others are simple. But they have all helped me mature, grow, and become a better person than I ever thought I could be.

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1. You cannot expect or rely on anyone to be there for you 100% of the time

This is what growing up is all about. One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that no one will always be there for you.

You cannot expect or rely on anyone to be there for you 100% of the time, because they won’t.

It’s hard to learn, but once you realize it, it’ll change your life.

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2. You must give yourself a chance to fail or succeed first.

When you’re young, you have so much time to be careful and perfect yourself. You don’t want to be seen as a failure.

You want to do well in school, get good grades, and get a good job.

But nothing comes easy, and there are no shortcuts.

One day I knew that if I didn’t give myself a chance to fail, I wouldn’t learn anything new about myself or grow up at all.

But it happens to the best of us, and even the strongest people in the world have setbacks.

You can’t always expect things to go your way, so you have to be ready for when they do.

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3. You must learn from your mistakes to grow up.

We all make mistakes in life, but we don’t learn from them. That might surprise you.

I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, as I’m sure you all have too.

Oddly enough, some of the things I regret the most I would not have done if I had known better from the start.

You can either sit around crying about it, or you can laugh at it and move on.

I laugh at almost every mistake I’ve made so that I don’t cry about them so much anymore.

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4. You must be able to live with yourself before you try to change others.

I made the mistake of trying to change people around me instead of changing myself first.

Sometimes I would try so hard to be perfect and please everyone that I forgot who I was and what I wanted out of life.

I had so much going on in my head that I couldn’t think straight anymore.

And once I had made changes to my life, I couldn’t take them all back.

I didn’t have time to think about what was wrong with my new life.

It was too much of an adjustment, and I wasn’t ready for it.

It’s a lot of pressure to have everyone be perfect around you because you do not have the tools or the time to fix it.

If you can’t fix the problems in your life yourself, then you can’t fix them in someone else’s life.

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5. You must discover what you want with your life BEFORE you try to be anyone else.

This is the only thing I wish I had figured out earlier in life.

I was so caught up in trying to please other people that I never even tried to figure out who I was and what I wanted out of life.

Only when you know who you are as a person and what you want out of life can you truly help other people make positive changes in their own lives.

Everyone should find out what they want out of life — at least one thing — before they try to make other people happy.

If you don’t know who you are or what you want in life, then it’s easy for others to tell you who and what to be.

You have to figure that out yourself before moving on with your life.

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These are my Five lessons. I hope that you find them useful, because these were all very important to me when I was growing up.

I wasn’t perfect at this when I was younger and made mistakes, but looking back on my life so far and what I’ve done, these are some good things to learn about yourself beforehand.

It’s not easy to fail (or even succeed) in life.

I wish I had realized these things earlier in my life, but it’s never too late to learn.

You just have to learn how, and that’s where I’m at now.

I am a lot less scared, tense, and wild than I used to be. It’s a good place to be, in my opinion.

Thanks for reading down here! This is what this blog is about: Inviting you along on my journey with me.

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Well, this is a blog post based on opinion, not a piece of professional advice.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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