It can be hard, but it’s also enriching.
Life is just kind of pointlessly cruel sometimes, I don’t think anyone’s gonna fight me on that. You meet unpleasant people, unpleasant things happen to you, and you’re scared of any unpleasantries that may come your way later down the line. The trick to staying happy when life is like this is not to pretend that it isn’t. All that is is repression, and repression doesn’t do anyone any favors. Rather, the trick is to practice compassion, for the world, the people on it, and yourself.
Just like random nonsense happens to you all the time, random nonsense is likely happening to other people all over the world at any given moment. Even many of the aforementioned unpleasant people are likely experiencing their own bout of unpleasantry at the moment you meet them. Nobody wants to be horrible to other people for no reason… well, okay, some people want to horrible to other people for no reason, but that’s called being a sociopath, and we’re not talking about that right now. It’s entirely normal to be frustrated with people giving you the business, but try to remember that someone or something else is likely giving them the business as well.
Of course, if you don’t have anyone to pin your frustrations on, you may be tempted to turn them inward, but, and I can tell you this from experience, self-loathing won’t solve anything. To practice self-compassion is not to skirt responsibility for the things that happen to you, but to accept your mistakes and work to fix them within your capability to do so. Even if you can’t fix every problem in the world (and you definitely can’t), as long as you don’t give up on being your best self, you can keep moving forward.
