Shower Thoughts with Shelly

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 Practice gratitude in your life

“I know he’s not even looking at me. He doesn’t see me at all.” “She didn’t even realize I had done it. It took her weeks to notice it had changed.”

Sometimes, you have a person in your life that is supposed to be your person, but it feels more like dead weight. You’re made to believe it’s one way, but everyday life shows you something else. And that hurts. It’s terrible to be lonely, but it’s so much worse to be lonely when you’re not actually alone. Going through life and feeling unseen, ignored, or skipped over… it wears on you. It nags at your sense of self. It depletes you.

You are not obligated to keep people in your life. If you have a toxic relationship with someone, and it’s making you into a person that you’re not happy with, that’s not a relationship. If a relationship is bad for your mental health, you shouldn’t continue it. You should not be sacrificing your personality for the sake of anyone.

Friendships, romantic relationships, working relationships… any kind of relationship is meant to be a reciprocal interaction between two individuals. You are never meant to be an absorbed part of someone else, to be an assumed piece of another person, like they would assume if they went to sleep with it, they’ll still have their arm in the morning. You are always an entirely separate being from the person next to you, and you should be treated that way, and you should treat them that way.

Somehow the people in our lives can begin to take us for granted. Not just in our actions, but our mere presence. That because we have been there, we will be there, and it is assumed that you don’t have to be treated well. It’s not true though. I’m here to tell you to practice gratitude in your life, to be grateful and recognize the good things you have. But I’m also here to tell you that you don’t have to be the assumed presence in someone’s life, either.

Native plants in an area will often grow whether you take good care of them or not. Prickly pear grows like crazy in South Texas, sometimes even if you’ve only dropped a piece of another plant, a new one will take root. It’s stubborn, and it will continue to grow, because it belongs here. But some plants will only survive inside your house because they’re not native… they can’t handle the heat. And ALL plants, if you don’t give them at least a little bit of water, will eventually wilt and die… because nothing survives without a minimum of care.

You’re just like a plant. Maybe you were always there… maybe you fit in well, or maybe you’re technically foreign to your surroundings. If you’re not met with basic care and effort, don’t let yourself wilt away. Go out where you can survive independently, or find someone that will attend to your basic needs, and you will bloom to your fullest potential.