Your life, your choice, your responsibility

There's one thing I always try to avoid when having problems in my personal life, and that's blaming others or blaming my surroundings for my situation. Whenever something bad happens to me, I try my best to focus on what I did wrong, in order to avoid doing the same thing in the future, and on the solution to my problem.

We live in a world where people get easily offended by words, which is pretty funny and stupid at the same time, at least from my point of view. I lived in a family where if you felt offended by something, you were told to shut up and grow up. There was no one to comfort you or defend you if you felt offended, because that wasn't such a big deal.

And it's not a big deal today either. However, people love feeling important enough to get offended by everything you say, and most of them love blaming their surroundings for everything that's wrong in their life in order to excuse themselves and feel better. Some even blame some "diseases" for the way they are, in order to excuse their behavior.

Let me give you an example. A child that is not capable of staying still for more than 5 minutes in school is told he or she has ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). I never really believed this is a "disease" or a "mental disorder" as some love to call it, but just a state induced by extreme boredom. A child that is not capable of paying attention in a boring class is told he has this "mental disease" and that he needs treatment.

However, the same child is able to stay for more than 8 hours in front of his computer, barely eating, barely going to the bathroom, playing video games for hours and hours. Where is his "mental disorder" then? I think there wasn't any in the first place, and school was just too boring for him or her. It's always easier to say the child has a "mental disorder" than to think about how broken and boring the educational system is.

We love to blame everything that's wrong with us or other people to exterior forces, in order to give the impression that we can't do anything about it. If we're sad for more than 2 weeks because our cat died, we instantly think we're depressed and there's nothing we can do about it, besides taking medication and talking about your dead cat for months to a psychologist. It's easier than to accept we are feeling too sad about something and that we should change.

I think this is wrong, and I think we should take responsibility for everything that's wrong in our life. We should stop getting offended by everything people say and we should start looking at ourselves.

If you're not happy with the way you look, if you're "overweight", or, in a simpler term, fat, and you hate everyone who reminds you of this, maybe it's time you realize you don't have a "mental disorder" that makes you eat every 2 minute, and that you just don't know how to control yourself.

If I hurt a few people in the next 20 minutes I can't blame it on a "mental disorder" that made me do all that, because I'll either be killed or sent to a facility that will give me medication and keep me locked for years to come, maybe until i die.

Most of the time there's no deficit and no mental disorder. There's nothing wrong with us except the ability to take responsibility for our actions. If you can't read because you've never been to school there's nothing you can do about it by complaining and feeling offended. You can take a few books, ask someone to help you and learn how to read in the next months. It's that easy.

Sadly, most people out there are too lazy to put any effort into changing themselves when they're not happy with something. I don't say everyone who looks different or feels different has to change.

If you're overweight and you like it, you don't mind it and you're not spending hours trying to convince people you're actually beautiful and they're the stupid ones, then stay the way you are. There's no way I can force you to do something you don't want, like change the way you look.

But if you're one of those people that constantly complain on social media about how hard life is, and how hard being overweight is, and how offended you feel by the models you see on TV, and how the media promotes skinny people instead of "natural" people, then you really have a problem, a mental one, and it's called "stupidity".

Most of the things that happen in our life that we hate are the result of our actions or, sometimes, the result of the lack of our actions. If we do something wrong or if we don't do anything at all and something bad happens to us, there's no one to blame for it but ourselves.

There's no point in trying to blame the universe, the world, the media, God, other people or whatever you can think about, for your problem. If you have a problem that resulted in you doing something wrong, we're not obligated to think good of you and see you as beautiful, healthy or smart, just because you're too lazy to take action.

A friend of mine and former high school class mate that I drink coffee with once a week decided to change things about himself a few years ago, and not feel offended by what people said.

He used to do drugs, drink a lot, stay with negative people that wasted most of his time, fight with others, beat people, and all kind of bad things. In a year, he changed completely. He stopped doing drugs, he stopped drinking, he became positive, started investing his time into useful activities, stopped fighting and bullying people and became, overall, a great person. Now he's a nurse, and he wants to go to college and become a doctor.

Same thing happened to my grandmother. Her parents didn't love her at all, they "gave" her to other people to take care of her when she was little, those people didn't care about her at all either and they put her to work a lot, every single day for years, until she couldn't bear it any more and left them to create her own life. At around 20 years old she lived with all kind of people, until she managed to build her own house (literally, SHE build her house with 0 experience) and after marrying my grandfather, she created a big family. She didn't complain, she didn't feel offended, she just did whatever it took to change her life. And she succeeded.

Almost everyone can change their life and the things they hate about themselves, and all it takes is some effort and a lot of determination. There is no good thing that can come from you complaining. Life won't suddenly change to make your happy, and the world has no obligation to see you the way you see yourself.

There are, of course, some exceptions. There are people in this world that have certain diseases that won't allow them to change some things no matter how much they try. Some people have cancer and they can't change that, some people have a real disease that won't let them lose weight no matter how much they starve themselves and no matter how much they exercise. And the examples are numerous. But those are exceptions, people who have real diseases that won't allow them to take action and change things. If you're not in a similar position, you have no excuse.

If you don't like something about yourself, if you feel offended all the time and if you wish to change everything, then it's time for you to step up and take care of things. Work, self education and change. That's what's needed in order to solve all your problems. It's your choice if you want things to be better or not, and it's your responsibility to take care of your life..