I spend a lot of time alone. When I was in high school, I would spend a majority of the time in my room binge watching shows, writing and reading. I think for a while my parents thought that it was a phase and would have to come and drag me out to hang out with them. But as I have grown older, I have realized that this is how I recharge. I willingly spend a lot of time alone and hanging out with myself has kind of been where I am the most comfortable. And this is not to say that I don’t love hanging out with my friends and family, BECAUSE I DO. But being alone is where I do my best self reflecting and allow myself to feel the most. 

I have lately realized that for a long time I took other people’s advice and opinions as the exact truth. If someone told me something about my relationship, suddenly that’s how I was viewing my relationship. If someone gave me advice on a situation, then I needed to incorporate part of that advice into my execution whatever the matter was. It didn’t hit me until moving to Arizona that I was even doing this. I always wanted my life to come off as perfect; my relationships, my mindsets, my friendships, my job, all of it. And in doing so, I felt like I needed to not go against the grain of what other people thought that I should be doing. THIS HAS VERY MUCH CHANGED. I have learned the value in saying no as well as the value of taking everything with a grain of salt. My truth can be very much different from your truth, and that’s okay. 

It was my senior year of college when I realized that I didn’t like to drink like I used to. Drinking gave me a lot (A LOT) of anxiety. It always felt like a lot of pressure to “have the best time” and see who could get the drunkest. It was fun for a while, but I realized that drinking made me feel like I was losing control. I would wake up the next day with the worst hangxiety and it would only be cured by going out again the next night to forget about it. I started to wait until all of my friends were the right amount of drunk and then I would leave the bar by myself to go home. At first, this would make my friends mad but then it became more normal. They started to see that this was something that I didn’t like to do anymore. This was the start of me saying no and creating new boundaries for myself. 

Being a people pleaser is fucking exhausting. And not only that, but it causes you to become the person who doesn’t have any boundaries. Suddenly you carry the standards of the “yes girl” , the one who will do anything, causing you to put all of your own needs on the backburner. You begin to fill everyone else’s cup before you are filling your own. You then find yourself really, really unhappy and almost angry. You’re angry that no one has noticed that you have done everything for them without feeling like they have reciprocated, but here is where I disagree. 

It is not other people’s jobs to pour into your cup. Actually, it is quite the opposite. I saw a post talking about how we are too old to have relationships where the energy isn’t reciprocated and if you aren’t pouring into my cup then I don’t have time for you. And my take on this is that we are actually too old to believe that other people need to pour into our cups at all. It is no one’s job to pour into your cup, and pouring into other people’s cups should be done out of love, not out of expectations of reciprocation. When I am alone, I am doing things that fill my own cup. I am writing, reading, watching a show, doing a facemask, taking a bath or just looking at my phone. I am recharging my own battery so that I have the right amount of energy to give to others. 

One of the most important things to figure out is how you recharge. Some people are more extroverted and can recharge when they are with other people. They find that talking to people, or going out makes them feel the most energized and that’s perfectly okay. I have found that being self aware is the only way to actually grow. It is easy to say that you are growing and learning, but when you find no faults in yourself and don’t truly know yourself then there is no way to grow. When you are self aware, then you are able to set boundaries on how other people are allowed to treat you, without these boundaries there are no rules. And no rules then leads to no backbone. Say no, become your favorite person to hang out with, and pour into other’s cups out of love. Fill your own cup.