If You Want To Live Your Best Life In 2023, Embrace Failure And Breakups
If you want to successfully shift from this era of your life into the next, you have to divorce the concepts of quitting and failure. Quitting should not automatically be considered a negative. It shouldn’t be a reason to feel ashamed about your situation. In most cases, it shouldn’t even be neutral. It should be a cause for celebration.
It’s so much easier to continue living out an unsatisfactory story than it is to make changes, so you should be proud of yourself for taking a more treacherous route. You should be admiring your strength and tenacity — and yes, you do have strength, even if you’ve been coping with nightly meltdowns and crying fits. Your tears aren’t a symbol of weakness. They mean you’re processing. You’re healing. You’re morphing into the person you were meant to become.
Even though you might not be thrilled with the terrain of your life right now, you shouldn’t be embarrassed about one leg of your journey coming to an end. If you were in a relationship with someone, then grew apart, or realized that you were destined for someone different after all, that doesn’t signal that you were a failure. It sounds more like you succeeded. You were together while you were positively impacting one another — then moved onto new experiences once you stopped making sense as a unit. There’s nothing embarrassing about realizing you’re with the wrong person and stepping away. In fact, you should be proud you realized you weren’t working, acknowledged the truth of the situation, and did something about it instead of pretending everything was perfectly fine.
It’s incredibly dangerous to have black-and-white thinking about how enduring is good and endings are bad, to pressure yourself to fix an unfixable relationship instead of considering whether walking away it is in your best interest, because you could end up stuck in a toxic situation. You need to remember there’s always an out. You never owe someone your years or your energy or your enthusiasm. You are allowed to walk away, and although it might feel like a punch to the gut at first, it takes bravery and wisdom to go that route when it’s so much easier to stick with what’s familiar.
Remember, you should never force yourself to remain in a situation just because it’s what others expect from you, or because it’s the way things have always been. History can change. You can change it. And it starts by accepting that endings aren’t embarrassments. They aren’t failures. They’re a signal of new beginnings.
In 2023, do yourself a favor and stop thinking of breakups and failure and rejection as the worst-case scenarios. Sometimes, those events can spark a change that redefines your whole life. Sometimes, the moments you’ve been dreading are actually moments worth celebrating. Moments when everything comes into perspective, when you realize what you really want or really deserve. Failure can propel you in an entirely new direction that you never would have thought to take. Or it could reignite your desire and motivation. It can push you to work even harder so you accomplish your goals. It doesn’t have to be a negative. It can be a beautiful thing.