"Learn from your past, don't live in it"

Inserting red flag here: This post is from my perspective. All opinion(s) written below are my own. 

I would just like to say that I am guilty of holding grudges for a long period of time and I let my past control what I do in the present. The past has a huge impact on the decisions I make today and it molds my values and beliefs. So do not read this post and think I am a strong individual who has his life under control, because I am in the same or even worse position than you, the reader, are at the moment. You might be thinking, "Why are you making a blog post about not living in your past if you live in your past?" I would first like to say that you have a point, however, I see this blog post as a letter to myself. I will come on my blog page every day, and I will look at this post and it will remind me that past experiences and events don't control my present. But enough of this self-reflection, lets get back to what this blog post is actually about. 

The problem I tend to see people, including myself, have is that they have a series of bad events or conflicts and the outcome of those events and conflicts causes some type of internal shock. This internal shock now resides with you for a huge period of time controlling what you say, do, and think because you know you don't want the same outcomes to come again. You, the viewer of this blog, is probably wondering what I am talking about? The best way to explain is to demonstrate it is through an example. An example can be that you gave advice to your friend that backfired and your friend got extremely angry at you. Due to this situation, the outcome became a burden on you, and you decided that from now on you wouldn't give people advice because it causes fewer complications. Yes, I agree that this does cause fewer complications because the reality is that you should not be interfering in other peoples conflicts and you're not their spiritual adviser. Your friend, family, significant others and side hoes, should be solving their own problem themselves and you should be going on through your day without that complication. However, it doesn't always work that way because that same friend comes back to you for advice even though it didn't end well the last time you gave advice. You are now in a predicament because your past experience is weighing down on you telling you not to give advice while your friend is standing in front of you asking you for advice. If you say no, it will cause an issue. If you give advice and it backfires again, it will also cause an issue. Now your past is weighing down on your present situation, and you are stuck. What do you do? You use your past experience as a learning experience and you let it go. You do not forget it, and you just stop it from controlling your current situation. What would I do if I was in your position? I give advice if I can and I will explain in very stern words that this advice is my opinion, and I am not telling or advising your friend to take it. Any decisions that your friend makes due to the advice I gave, is fully their responsibility and if they get upset like the previous time, I will no longer be in-service as a friend or adviser. Now you must be thinking, "What did you learn from your past experience?". It's quite clear, by saying what I said, you have learned to communicate better with your friend that the past situation was unacceptable and you will not accept the same outcome this time. Furthermore, you have made it clear that the advice is just advice, you are not forcing any decisions upon them. They have to make the decision themselves. Thus, you have learned quite a lot from a past situation without it burdening and stopping you from doing something in the present situation. 

What was the point of this blog post? If I were to give you an honest answer, there is a reason your past is called the past. It should not intertwine with your present and pull you down. It does not mean that you keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again because I am telling you to not let your past control you. If you know that a past situation does not have a solution and its best to avoid the situation overall, then by all mean do it. Our lives are too short to be having constant drama or causing conflicts over and over again due to the same scenario that happened in the past. Learn from your past experience and let that learning experience help you approach life from a different perspective. 

"Change is inevitable"

Inserting red flag here: This post is from my perspective. All opinion(s) that are written below are my own. 

Change is a constant in everyone's life. We all go through change whether we want to or not. Change is a common factor between me and the viewer reading my blog post. We might not have the same changes, however, a change happens in our life one way or another, in a positive or negative aspect. I can wake up one day and decide that I want to move to a new city or I can just want to eat something different today. Regardless of how small the change is, they are changes we make willingly and others that are forced on us. You must be thinking, "How can you be forced to make a change in your life? You have control of what you want to change." To that, I agree and I also disagree. There comes times in your life when nature takes it course and you have no control over the situation or the situation is too foregone to stop the change from happening. I will give some life examples of where I did not have the option for change to occur. 

Broken Friendships: 

There comes a time in many peoples lives where you experience a friendship breaking due to mistake you made, mistakes they made, or the friendship is not really there anymore and both parties of the friendship realize that. Of course, there are many reasons to why a friendship can break, but, the three stated above are the reasons my friendships broke. I am not going into details about broken friendships due to the topic being about change, however, this is a situation where we have little to no control over the situation and the changes that revolve around it. When someone is exiting your life, you no longer have association with them. You do not see them regularly at school, talk to them on the phone, go out with them or even see them as much as you used too. If they were important to you, you would miss them for a period of time, which is also a change because you went from seeing them to missing them and its perfectly normal. The best way to deal with change is to accept the change and in my case, I accepted the fact that my friend will no longer be there and I will find other friends to associate with. This doesn't happen automatically and does take a great deal of time depending on what your relationship was with this friend but, it doesn't mean its not possible. One aspect with change is that its adaptable, if you are willing to adapt to it. When my friendship broke, I denied the change which made me have feelings of annoyance and displeasure because I was upset that I would never see them again, however, through time I realized that I will use their friendship as a learning experience and move forward. I will learn from the mistakes I made, mistakes they made, and mistakes that could have happened if the friendship continued and keeps them in my arsenal. My friendship with them will help me become a better person so when I associate with people in the future, the same mistake does not occur, thus adapting to the change that has occurred in my life. 

Mismatched Career Path: 

You must be reading this and wondering what a mismatched career path is? Well its when you decide to go down a career path and realize it's not for you. You had hopes and expectations on what this career path would be like and you ended up disappointment or in loss of words because this is something you do not want to do for the rest of your life. You might argue that you can avoid mismatching career paths by researching properly and understanding what it is and I will give you credit for that. However, there is a huge difference in reading a job description on career cruising and experiencing the career firsthand. This happens to many people, and they assume after reading a career job description that this is what they want to do and when they get there, they realize its nothing that they had hoped. There are a few aspects of change that can occur in this whole ordeal. First, as a person grows older, they have room to change their personality, likes, dislikes, interests, etc. So as you are going through school for such a long span of time and you start changing as a person, which is absolutely normal might I add, then its normal to dislike what you thought would be the best career path for you. This change to your personality happens a lot without you noticing that it is happening to you, in actually you have no control over it and you end up disliking what you thought you liked. Now don't get me wrong, people probably do notice, however, I didn't and I feel like I don't like the career path I chose to obtain. Second, which is going to be my last experience because I realized that this blog post is getting really long, is when the career you have chosen to go into has started to change in responsibilities or knowledge required while you are in school. It's normal for jobs and careers to change or increase the responsibilities in the workplace, in the slightest. For example, a computer programmer needs to stay updated with the current technologies and computer languages or you will have conflicts with basically doing your job. So, if I were to be learning a language in post-secondary and by the time I graduated, they decided to change it significantly, I would need to adapt to this change and learn the most recent practices for coding. You can see where you have no control over the situation because whether you like it or not, the coding practices have changed and is required to be learned to stay updated with the industry. 

So, what exactly should you take from these long ass paragraph? Change is going to happen whether you like it or not, so make the best of it or change it again to give you positive results in your life. Some changes are uncontrollable, and you have to adapt with in order to move forward in life or determine if the chosen career path is right for you. Regardless, change is inevitable. 

"Space"

Inserting red flag here: This post is from my perspective. All opinion(s) that will be stated are my own and if someone doesn't agree, they can comment about it down below or contact me through my email/social media. I will be talking about asking "space" from friend(s) as that is what I have experience with. 

When it comes to asking friend(s) for space, both sides of the friendship need to be taken into consideration. The person asking for space and the person who you are asking space from need to be on an understanding ground. This is not always the case, but I will discuss that later on. The person who is asking for space needs to realize that this is not an excuse to get rid of a person you do not like. If you do not like the friend you are associating with, you need to end the friendship. From my experience and experience I've seen from friends, a friend would ask for "space" repeatedly, avoid them for a certain period of time without explaining the conflict and then pop back into their lives pretending like everything is great. Their excuse for asking for "space" would be "you're too clingy" or "you're too attached" to them, which is understandable, people do have the right to their personal space. However, this would be hypocritical as the person is repeatedly asking for space and then coming back after one to two weeks. This shows that you are too attached (aka clingy) to your friend to let go and thus, you do the second best thing in your head which is asking for "space" to solve a conflict. This vicious cycle of asking for "space", is not only disrespectful to the friend you're avoiding, but also it isn't solving your problem with your friend. If you genuinely have an issue with your friend, you need to figure out what the issue is and communicate your problem. 

While I read this post over, I do realize that my argument thus far is narrow because I've been using my real-life example as a way to support my argument without taking other factors into consideration. Other factors can include not having an understanding ground, which I mentioned above. For example, you like your friend but the friend causes a lot of conflicts, or they lean on you too much for advice/support which is putting you in a tough position. For this scenario, a few things need to be taken into consideration which includes communicating with your friend and explaining the problem at hand. If that does not work, you can then ask for "space" to help you evaluate the situation (which is not a repetitive chosen action) and help you decide what your next step will be. With this solution, there can be conflicts because the friend can ignore your request and continue to act as if everything is normal which should give you the red flag to end the friendship. Reason being, if there is no respect, trust, or understanding in a friendship, there is no friendship. This would be a very clear example of not having an understanding ground and being in a dysfunctional friendship.

Lastly, if we look at this from the perspective of the person who you are asking "space" from, you are not required to agree with your friends request for "space." This does not mean you should ignore them and act like everything is normal, I mean you can decline and end the friendship. I know you must be thinking that is so ridiculous because they're your friend and you love hanging with them. This makes sense, however, I would like to give a little insight. If your friend is asking you for "space" due to an issue they have with you and you know you won't change or you believe that you are not in the wrong; then there is no point of wasting each others time. Your friend will continue to have an issue with you which will result in your friend asking for space and you'll continue to act the same way. This will become a vicious cycle until one of you either gives up or changes their mind set. What I feel that people need to understand is that you do not need to change yourself for anyone. If you believe that you are in the right, you do not want to change your ways, then you need to start associating with people who like you for you. Giving into peoples pleas for "space" is not in the description of being their friend, and you are not required to do so if you do not want to. 

I can talk about this topic for days, however, I am going to stop it there as we talked about 3 different scenarios when it comes to asking for "space." I hope you like the read and I apologize if you do not agree with my point of view. This is just my opinion on the topic. I do not expect you to follow this and go around ending your friendship with people, however, do keep this at the back of your head when it comes to situations like these.