19 Life Lessons We Don’t Want To Learn

Kevin Dooley
Kevin Dooley

1. There are only a certain amount of friends we can really have at any given point, and the rest are going to hover closer to acquaintance-status out of necessity. The people who seem to be surrounded with tons of people at every social event likely don’t have any more true friends than anyone else, they just have more reliable acquaintances.

2. No matter how much time or energy you spend on your appearance, it won’t make you feel any better around the people you feel inferior around for superficial reasons. Even if you are wearing nothing but designer labels and have come straight from the salon, you’ll still feel like a fraud if you were trying to impress them with your clothes in the first place.

3. Your crush doesn’t owe you anything, even if you feel head-over-heels in love with them and are nicer to them than you are to anyone else in your life. If they don’t reciprocate your feelings, that does not make them an asshole, unless they are an asshole about telling you.

4. You are not entitled to be invited to everything, even if you think that you should be. And if you are consistently feeling left out of friends’ events, perhaps you should consider whether or not they are actually friends.

5. Not everything that your friends do without you is intended to be some personal slight; sometimes people just don’t think about inviting everyone when they do things.

6. When someone you love has their heart broken — even if you are siblings or the best of friends — there is literally nothing you can do to make them really feel better, except listening to them when they talk. It’s a pain that everyone has to deal with on their own, and you can’t take it away from them just by sharing your own experiences.

7. Sometimes people are going to be depressed for what appears to be no good reason, and it’s not something they can just exercise their way out of so they can come to the party on Saturday.

8. If you don’t share a sense of humor with someone, it will never work out between the two of you — no matter how sexy they are. (Yes, even if it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt wearing a grey two-button suit. Though I’m pretty sure he has the perfect sense of humor and would find all of us hilarious.)

9. The values you were taught at home and which you take with you through your life are not necessarily universal ones, and they may even be damaging. But you are the one who has to work through the negative perceptions that your parents imposed on you throughout childhood.

10. You can’t make someone better in bed unless they are actually willing to learn and communicate, even if you get along swimmingly in every other area of the relationship.

11. Just because you have always wanted to do something creative doesn’t mean you’ll ever be really good at it. (She says, dripping tears of frustration over her failed attempt at sketching hands.)

12. Though much of it can be adjusted through diet and exercise, we all have different body types that are destined to look different and require certain things. Some of us were destined to have no curves, others will never get close to a size two regardless of how much healthy lifestyle choices we make.

13. There is no amount of status or money or popularity that you can achieve that will make you inherently better than someone else, even that douchebag you went to high school with.

14. Sometimes the people that your ex left you for were actually much better for them, and they are happier now, and they absolutely don’t regret leaving you to get with them.

15. People are, for your whole life, going to talk shit behind your back at some point. It’s an inescapable fact of life and you know full well that, from time to time, you say things about others that are kind of the opposite of nice. The best solution is to just not think about it, and not try to find out what they said specifically.

16. These aforementioned shit-talkers will occasionally include your friends, but that’s only human, and sometimes we act like crappy people who deserve to get a little bit of shit talked behind our backs.

17. You are actually much better-looking than you give yourself credit for, but it’s actually a positive thing that you don’t go through life relying on your looks, as we don’t know what it means to be “ruined by your beauty” until you meet someone who has been. And then we know, all too well.

18. Alcohol is an unnecessary expense most of the time.

19. You’re going to lose closeness with the vast majority of people you once really cared about, even with social media and a million ways to stay in touch, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a normal, healthy emotional molting process that is going to take place regardless of how many times you like their status updates. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

 

Chelsea Fagan founded the blog The Financial Diet. She is on Twitter.

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