What life has taught me in 22 years.

You need to figure out who you are. Do not depend on anyone else to define you.

Beauty and all other personality traits of a person are subjective. The most beautiful person for someone may be the ugliest for another person. Not that looks matter at all, but the soul and personality heavily influence the kind of people a person will attract. Your job is not to change according to the preferences of other people, but to just put yourself out there and be yourself.

You must stop seeking validation by changing yourself for two reasons. Firstly, because it lacks originality and secondly because you will stop appealing to REAL people who originally liked you for your REAL self. You will lose all these REAL people to a mask, a pretension. A better option is to stay constant. An example to explain the need to be constant: imagine yourself being lost in a mall as a child. You go crazy moving from one place to another looking for your parents and your parents are in turn looking for you. Since you keep moving it becomes harder for your parents to find you. You need to understand that you are the thing that is lost and not your parents.

You are the thing that is being looked for so it will facilitate everything if you just stay in one place. Think of it as if your child-self was who you are originally and your parents being the REAL people who love you for you and not just some mask you put on.

We fail to understand and implement the signs and teachings that we get from passing time. Passing time in fact has the most to teach. Experiences, relationships, arguments, achievements are all elements of passing time. If you introspect and think about what you have gone through in the past week, month or year you will automatically stop making the same mistakes again and again and will avoid repetitive and unnecessary failure.

Who invented the concept of luck? On what basis is this so-called luck provided to a person? Luck to me sounds like a lazy excuse to dilute or magnify the impact of your past actions. It basically comes down to the choice you make based on your intentions. Look at it like life being a big 'choose the right door' game. You land up where you choose to be. You make your life what you subconsciously want it to be. Karma is just your intellect (the angel on your shoulder) making choices according to where you think you deserve to be. Like if you were the toxic one in your previous relationship, subconsciously you will later put yourself in a relationship where you get treated the same way and learn. All this happens mindlessly and then we get up and say 'karma happened'. Now go back and look at your life with the above approach. You may or may not agree with this perspective but this is what I have observed.

There is a reason why it is famously said that ' we accept the love we think we deserve'. The guilt in our minds plays a huge role in this. It is our way of realising how a third person would have felt. We put ourselves through the same thing over and over until we realise that what we had done was wrong. This is the main reason why terrorists do not believe in concepts like karma. It is because they have no conscience. No mind, no intellect, no guilt and no fear. They believe that choices have already been made for them and they have no responsibility towards the choice.

The reason why people even believe in karma is because they fear it. Just like a fairly religious Hindu mother saying 'paap padega' or 'bhagwan maaf nahi karenge'. We fear the consequence but never regret the action which was wrong in the first place.

It is us, who are responsible for where we want to land up in life. People who are in the worst situations and do not even have a single rose petal on their bed of life become world leaders. How this happens also comes back to choices. They CHOOSE to use their problems as an advantage and not as an excuse. Think of it this way: coronavirus is a worldwide crisis, but businessmen use this to their advantage to make more money.

These people choose to defeat circumstances and make a statement to the universe.

Their strength is not dimmed by man made concepts like karma and luck. It is just pure determination. A person who is very close to my heart once told me in a deep conversation at 3:00 am, "If people keep blaming their 'haalaat' or circumstances for not faring well in life or becoming drug addicts and believing that life has put them in this situation and not they themselves, if this was the case Oprah Winfrey would have shot herself years ago"

Don't let your emotions cloud your judgement. The decisions made in fury or excessive affection will often make you end up in complicated situations. Think rationally before saying a mean thing to someone you love. It may cause you to lose the relationship forever. Don't act out of impulse. Act out of consideration for yourself and the people around you.