REMEMBER THIS:

No matter how rocky your relationship with yourself may be, no one, ever, EVER will have the right to tell you that you are a bad person.

Indeed.

People can be sh*tty. Mankind has a great whopping capacity to essentially do whatever the hell s/he wants. And this in itself, as you can imagine, has the potential to cause a lot of mayhem.

But one of the most important personal, spiritual journeys you will encounter is the one you have with yourself.

This is life, and in case you haven’t already heard, it comes with a wonderful concoction of side effects, consequences and of course, a tonne of bullsh*t. The point of this? It’s to see how you bounce back and rebuild yourself after you tackle said shituations. You will make bad decisions, you will regret it, you may not, but the fundamental thing is that learn to, at a point when you are ready, step outside of yourself and know you have grown.

You want to be feeling something like this in your mind:

Not this:

or, less melodramatically:

Being swallowed by self-hatred and fixating on the things you may have done, the mistakes you may have made the wrong turns you may have taken – well, we all know where this will end up. It’s the easier option, no doubt, but you certainly do not deserve to suffer for things you are now clearly repenting for. To acknowledge it, learn from it and grow is the best step forward – and you will feel so liberated after releasing yourself from that oppressive arsehole that is regret.

#AmIRite?

Ask yourself:

Can I change it?

Am I gaining anything from this?

Is this making me happy?

If your response to the above is a resounding no, then this is the first step to letting go and embracing who you deserve to be.

Ultimately, you are the judge of you – you know yourself best, and therefore don’t ever deserve to be told who you are by someone who is clearly talking about themselves – and someone who is equally as clearly unhappy with themselves. At no point do you deserve to believe that you are the cause of someone else’s misery. In the word’s of the mighty Justin Bieber: you should go and love yourself. But in the non-aggressive, bitter way that Biebs is clearly feeling – but we won’t get into song lyric analysis just now.

The best thing to do, to put it bluntly: be kind to the knobs of the world, because they probably need it the most.

And finally, some Ryan Gosling to brighten your day: