My friends, my rules.

 

I can still recall how these four words were said to me and how I stood there, frozen with time. I thought I knew the value of loyalty, but you will never be able to define it best until you learn to define it through its opposite: betrayal.

And the best way to define it was through experience.

To this day, out of the many things I was able to let go of, I kept a book from my childhood days. It was the fairytale book The Beauty and the Beast. It is with so much emotion that I would always play the voice of the beast, saying:

“You ungrateful man! Whose bed did you sleep in? Whose food have you eaten? And whose clothes are you wearing? Mine, mine, mine! And you repay my kindness by stealing my roses? You shall die.”

There weren’t any gruesome, blood-all-over-the-place death that transpired that day, except for something inside me that snapped and bid goodbye. When Psyche spilled hot oil from the lamp that woke her lover Cupid, he flew with his broken wing after saying the words, Love cannot survive without trust.

I couldn’t trust the man in front of me anymore. And although I left that day to watch a movie alone and bought all my favorite food inside the cinema, a part of me didn’t find its way back home anymore. A part of me needed revenge. I wanted this man to have a taste of his own medicine.

And I did it so well. I was so good at taking matters into my own hands. However, in revenge, you do not hurt anyone else more than you hurt yourself. When I could’ve ended things right then and there, I didn’t. I kept things as they were, with unholy intentions. I stayed with the thought of vengeance every single minute. I stayed with the thought of making my own rules and finding my own ‘friends.'

My intuition was telling me that it was the end of the road, but I didn’t know how to listen to that voice back then.

So, I ruined and ruined and ruined myself. When you do bad things, you don’t hurt other people. You hurt yourself and yourself alone. At the end of the day, I have no one to blame as I continuously dug a shithole out of my life.

But in complete darkness, that is where you see the tiny light in you. That is where you draw the line and cultivate the almost nonexistent light that is in you. That is where you question, What the fuck am I doing with my life?

Life isn’t meant to blame others for the road you decide to take. At the end of the day, we are given an internal compass, telling us which direction we should take, and the more we try to take a path that is not ours to take, we lose ourselves.

But we can always find our way back.

These four words are now imprinted on me. I know I couldn’t love someone whose loyalty wasn’t mine to keep. Those four words are the reason why it’s easier for me to let go of people, friends, of networks that don’t serve my highest good, of those who don’t align with my greatest potential. With that experience, I know that staying will simply harbor negative emotions that wouldn’t serve a great purpose. I no longer want to be thinking of revenge or hurting anyone, especially myself. I take it as my internal compass telling me to get out and make room for new people to arrive.

And it always gets better, all the time.

Those four words made me realize that I shouldn’t be friends with married men or anyone in a relationship, for I cannot have an open ear to listen to problems that arise in someone else’s connection unless it is something that you want to go through in a paid astrology reading. Those issues must be tackled in the relationship itself. I also couldn’t see myself joining conversations talking about other people and their decisions, for I would never know the whole story. It is a waste of the greatest commodity there is—time. Not everyone has plenty of them.

The people I still have in my life know this, and life is so much more peaceful this way. Mark Manson said that we only have limited fucks, and this is a fuck I’m not willing to give away.