Some people are naturally selfish and inconsiderate. They move through life thinking only about what benefits them, rarely stopping to consider how their actions affect the people around them. They’ll take your kindness, disregard your feelings and make decisions that hurt you without giving it a second thought, as long as they get what they want. What’s exhausting is realising that not everyone thinks about others the way you do. Not everyone considers how their words might hurt, how their absence might affect someone or how unfairly they’re treating a person who genuinely cares about them. The best thing you can do is accept who they are, stop expecting them to develop a conscience overnight and remove yourself from their reach. May we never cross paths with the people who mistake our kindness for something they can exploit. May life keep us far away from those who bring nothing but selfishness, hurt and unnecessary chaos into our lives.

Unreciprocated love is a different kind of hurt. It’s loving someone with your whole heart while knowing you may never mean to them what they mean to you. It’s noticing the little things about them, remembering the smallest details, wanting to tell them everything about your day and secretly wishing they felt the same way. It’s giving someone a place in your heart they never really asked for, hoping that one day they’ll look at you and finally see what you’ve been trying so hard not to say out loud. It’s the constant battle between holding on to the possibility that things might change and accepting that you cannot make someone love you just because you love them. And perhaps the hardest part is that there’s no clear villain. They don’t have to be a bad person for you to be hurting. They may genuinely care about you, just not in the way you wish they did. You can’t even be angry at them for not feeling something they cannot force themselves to feel. So you grieve a relationship that never really existed, a future you quietly imagined and a version of love you kept hoping would become real. There is something heartbreaking about having so much love to give someone and having nowhere for all that love to go.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being angry at people who are no longer even a part of it. Think about it. You can carry all that resentment, replay everything they did and wish things had turned out differently, but none of it changes what already happened. The hurt is real and some things leave wounds that take years to heal. But at some point, you have to ask yourself: how much longer am I going to let someone who is no longer in my life continue to affect the way I live it? Holding on to anger can feel like the only way to honour what you went through, as if letting go means what they did no longer matters. But it does matter. Your pain matters. And so does your peace. I know how difficult it is to release something that still haunts you in ways no one else could ever fully understand. Healing isn’t as simple as deciding to move on and forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending it never happened, excusing their behaviour or allowing them back into your life. Forgiveness is simply deciding that what happened to you will no longer have unlimited access to your present. It’s accepting that you may never get an apology, an explanation or the accountability you deserved, and choosing to stop waiting for those things before you allow yourself to heal. Forgive them for yourself, not for their sake. You deserve to experience a life where your peace is no longer held hostage by the people who hurt you.