Whether it’s your 20s or your 30s, you have the choice to either make the best or the worst out of your so-called ‘prime years.’ While I have been on both ends of the spectrum, I don’t really know how you can live your best life just yet, but I do know a thing or two about how you unknowingly ruin these years.

1. Listen to what everyone has to say and forget to listen to your own voice. Forget that your calling will only find you when you silence everyone and follow your voice and when you guide yourself to claim it.

2. Stay at the job you hate without trying to change it because people will call you a ‘quitter’ and wake up hating your life more and more every day just to prove people who don’t matter wrong.

3. Convince yourself that this the life you want to live because that’s how your parents lived or how your friends are living and you’d be crazy if you think that you can live the ‘life of your dreams.’

4. Forget that you are your own person with different dreams. Forget to believe in yourself and settle for the familiar or ‘safe’ life instead.

5. Stay attached to the wrong person or keep fighting for a one-sided relationship because you believe there’s no one out there better for you and heartbreak is romantic.

6. Tell yourself that your standards are too high and you will never find the love you’re looking for so it’s better to settle than to be alone.

7. Keep living in the city that’s burning you out because leaving is a hassle and you can’t handle starting over. Better safe than sorry.

8. Be complacent. Keep thinking that there’s not much you can do to change your life or your thoughts or yourself. Keep thinking that it’s too late to change your life and live in misery instead.

9. Keep dwelling on your past and let it prevent you from moving forward. Keep holding onto fear rather than hope.

10. Keep waiting for ‘someday.’ Keep postponing everything you want to do until the circumstances are perfect and the stars are aligned and the odds are in your favor.

11. Take rejection personally. Be so hard on yourself when you’re not chosen for a job or when someone can’t love you back. Make it all about you. Make it all about how you’re a failure and you’re not good enough and you don’t deserve good things.

12. Fear happiness because you believe it’s always going to be temporary. Sabotage good things because you got used to things falling apart. Make pain your friend instead.

13. Look for someone to save you. Look for someone to validate you. Look for someone who can do everything you’re capable of doing for yourself because it’s easier to love yourself if someone else loves you first.

14. Expect to have an easy life because you’re comparing your life to others. Expect to have the same journey as people your age or in the same career or in the same environment. Expect your life to mirror the life of those around you.

15. Don’t love yourself because you’re confused or poor or single or divorced or unemployed or lost. Only love yourself when things are working out, when things are perfect, when the world bends over backwards for you.

Rania Naim’s new poetry book
All The Letters I Should Have Sent
is now available for pre-order here.