7 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Earlier

1. You’re living in a world which is constantly trying to kill you, by stealing your voice. You’ll find someone else’s voice filling the room instead of yours, and you will be expected to take a step back. But when the world tries to kill you by stealing your voice, kill it back.

2. You will not be the best always. There will be times when you will mess everything up or when you’ll fail at your job and the world will turn you down. On days like these, even when you’re not the best, even when everything falls apart, you’ll always be good enough for yourself and you will never need validation for that.

3. There will be days when you feel like you’re a puzzle whose pieces have gone missing, or feel like an empty photo frame stuck on a wall full of happy pictures feeling you don’t belong there. On days like these, something will make you realize that you belong to the moon and stars on a clear winter night sky, or to the roads where people find traces of home.

4. When anyone tries to convince you to treat your love like an eclipse, like it deserves to be swallowed in darkness because it shines too bright when looked at, do not align yourself with the axis of their expectations. What you feel will never be invalid and even if you feel as if your heart might explode if you care so much, it’ll never get too much.

5. There will be days when you’ll be surrounded by meadows of disappointment, when everything you get will be lesser than everything you bargained for, but this won’t mean you deserve any less. The world is limitless and so are you, so even when you become this diminished firefly with crumpled bodies and creased wings, you’ll always shine against time, still be breathing, still alive.

6. When you have to deal with your first heartbreak and people tell you it’s just a phase which will pass soon, tell them you don’t like the word just, and you’re not “just” anything, and your love was never just a phase, because the word ‘just’ makes it confined to being nothing more, and your love was everything more than ‘just’ those coffee dates they saw.

7. The world will try to kill you in many different ways. Some you expected, some which will come at random. But you know what? You’re going to kill it back.