Archive for October, 2011

Halloween AND the night before NaNo?

Posted: October 31, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
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Could it get any worse for people with kids who are participating this year? I think other than December, November has to be the worse month to do this, but here we are.

I have much empathy for you as I live alone, so it doesn’t matter what I do tonight. I can hand out candy or turn the porch light off and pretend I’m not home.

I admit that I ate a lot of the candy last night. I couldn’t help it. That’s why I never buy it because that’s what I do – I eat it.

Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of posting and talk about not being ready for NaNo and I think that’s the whole point of it. It’s not about being ready. It’s all about doing it in spite of it.

This will be my second year and I’ve been ready to start since last week. I am using this time to finish my first draft of a book I started over a year ago. I seem to be able to always find something else to do.

But over the last few weeks, I have put my writing way on top of my list of priorities. After eating, sleeping and working, it comes in at 4th place. Sometimes I nudge it down to 5th when family/friends obligations come up, but not too often.

But maybe someone can answer me this – How DO you get ready to take a month out of your life and rearrange it completely and make writing your priority? How does anyone do that?

I know what I do. I get up early and try to write, but I always seem to forget that I am the WORSE morning person to have ever awakened. I’m not kidding. I’ve never been someone who is wide awake and happy first thing in the morning. In fact, I’ve actually had fights with boyfriends and family over it. I tell them “Look, it takes me awhile to wake-up in the morning, so if you could just cool it for about 1/2 hour, everything will be fine” and then they take this as some type of challenge. Yeah, that’s about the time I start looking at tossing my coffee at them, but I’ve learned to just to smile and not say anything until they stop bouncing around like Tigger on meth.

So, morning doesn’t work well for me. I’m much more creative in the late morning and early afternoon, so most likely I will spend my lunch hour working on my word count. I usually take about 15 minutes for lunch, but even then I can get something done.

I have an evening or two that I can work on it, but there’s a few nights that I can’t. What I ended up doing last year was jamming on the weekends and that requires turning off the phone and unplugging the internet.

What is hard is that the people around me just don’t understand but they know me well enough to realize it is absolutely pointless to try to tell me anything or to get me to do something I don’t want to do. I tell them about NaNo and I get this hesitant smile from them and you can see them mentally scratch their heads and nod. It doesn’t make any sense and why should it?

It’s insane to write 50,000 words a month and I have yet to learn how to turn off my inner editor. I’ll post more on that later, but it is a huge challenge for me and most writers.

Last year I had severe sleep deprivation and I am hoping to avoid that this year, but I honestly don’t see a way around it. I am going to have to force myself to write in the morning and do everything I can to hit my daily word count.

Plus I am trying to finish before Thanksgiving, so my word count will have to be at least 2,173 per day.

So, here we go! Tomorrow is a big day and I would love to know what you do. How do you make the time to do this?

Have you done this before and if so, what happened to your book after Thanksgiving? I am still working on mine. For me, about mid-year of completing it, lots of things went wrong in life and I had to put my writing aside to take care of a family emergency. I found that I lost my momentum and it was very hard to start it back up again.

I hope that by doing NaNo again this year, I will enjoy it and get back into the habit of writing every day and actually finishing the first draft and start my next book.

What are your long-term goals for NaNo? I am dying to hear from other people

My job is to make you stupid. Sorry about that.

Posted: October 27, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Yes, that’s what I do. I make people feel stupid. It’s amazing that I get paid to do this.

And I am really good at it. In fact, I love it.

Why do I do that? Because that is the ONLY way to get a human to learn. I didn’t make the rules on this, but it is the way we learn.

You think you’re afraid of failure? Nope. You’re just like the rest of us, you’re afraid of looking stupid. See, when you fail, you look and feel stupid.

When you slam a hammer down on your thumb rather than the nail, after you stop screaming, you feel stupid. Well, it was a dumb thing to do.

If you trip and fall and the whole world sees you, you feel that horrible redness take over your face. You want to run and hide or wish the earth would open up and swallow you. You want to go back in time – rewind and re-record it before you slipped on the sidewalk. You knew, right before you fell, that you should be paying more attention. You should not have been walking and texting at the same time.

You feel so stupid for having dated/married THAT person. Your friends told you not to do it. Your family begged you to break off the engagement but NO! You went ahead anyway and when it didn’t work out, you felt like an idiot. Well, you probably were one. And I know it took you a long time to let people know it was over.

But, think about it. You know that burner is hot and not because you read about it. There is no owner’s manual for a human. You know it’s hot because you can feel it and probably have burned yourself once or twice on it. See? You know it’s hot but you still burned your hand.

You know that pizza needed to cool off for a few minutes before you dig into it, but you don’t wait and burn the roof of your mouth. How many times have you done that? I do it every single frickin time. No lie.

You knew it was a bad idea to send that money to the poor orphan in Nigeria who was dying of cancer in a jail and who only had you out of 6.5 billion people to help him. You were the only one that could save his life.

No one likes to look or feel stupid, but that’s how we learn. That’s what I do for a living. I teach. I teach business owners how to run things better and in order to do that, they have to see what they’ve been doing wrong. That’s where I come in.

I don’t do it to be mean. I do it to help but unless you’re willing to smack your head against a wall a few times, you will never learn.

I have to get them to see why bribing employees is not such a great idea when they’ve been late, non-productive and a Queen Bitch from Hell and that maybe giving them a raise won’t improve their behavior. It actually makes it worse, just like giving a child candy every time they have a temper tantrum.

I have to go over, in great detail, why the person answering the phone needs to be friendly and not say “WHAT?” when picking up the incoming call, even if she’s his niece and is in desperate need of a job because no one else will hire her.

Then there’s the time I had to make a guy feel really moronic in getting him to stop hugging his employees and having “daily affirmations” as part of a staff meeting and to shut the hell up about his political beliefs. Yes, I had to do that and it took a long time of me pounding this into his pinhead for him to finally say “Well, OK, maybe that’s not such a good way to run a business after all.” Ya think?

Or the time I had to make a client feel bad about being online all day rather than, I don’t know, actually running his business?  Boy, did that guy feel pretty stupid by the time I was done with him. But, he never did it again.

I have my own trail of stupidity, so you aren’t alone.

I was stupid when I thought that an abusive man wouldn’t be that way to me. Wrong.

I was stupid when I thought by ignoring the IRS, they would go away. So very wrong.

I was stupid when I thought I could walk all day in 4″ heels. Wrong and I have the damage to my feet to prove it.

I was stupid when I listened to a bonehead “friend” who said I didn’t have the talent to write. I hope the bitch is reading this right now.

And I was incredibly wrong in thinking that the “check oil” light in the car would magically go away. I ended up with a cracked block on that puppy and an enormous bill from the mechanic to prove how stupid I can be.

But, all of these things, I never did again. I don’t hang out with mean people, I pay my taxes on time, I wear flats when spending the day walking around San Francisco and I run to the mechanic anytime something is wrong with my car.

I still bite into hot pizza though. I actually can’t help it.

We all have these trails and rather than be bothered by them, learn from them. You don’t learn about life from reading books.  We learn about life from falling down and getting up again. We learn when we admit we are wrong and try to find a better way the next time.  We learn from our mistakes. We are the only ones that can teach ourselves. We are the only ones that can change who and what we are.

So go out there and make a fool of yourself. Let your weirdness shine. Smack your head against the wall a few times if you need to. Fall down and scrape your knees and get up and do it again. I always tried to tackle that very long and steep street with my roller blades. I have permanent scars on my knees, but I eventually won. It took a whole summer, but I did it. How I never sustained worse injuries than my knees I will never know.

There’s nothing to be afraid of. So what if you make a fool of yourself? Why should you be different from any of us?

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Women I have known: Crazy psycho bitch.

Posted: October 21, 2011 in funny stories
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Not only was she a crazy, psycho bitch, but I actually hired her! I do cringe in typing that and maintaining my vow to be honest as a writer. But, yes, I’ve hired a few of them and I really should have seen it coming.

This particular one I am thinking about was the last one in a chain of them. We shall call her…Debbie because I don’t feel like getting sued.

I realize that it’s hard to get a good overall idea about someone during a job interview and I know that people are struggling. I was struggling a bit as the owner of a small business and I really needed a competent and stable individual to take over my sales department and get things moving back in the right direction.

I also violated the advice we give all our clients. “Don’t hire in desperation. Better to leave the job unoccupied than to hire a moron.”

But, there I was and she had come with some great recommendations from people I know. I interviewed her and so did my boss and we decided to give it a try. There is a long runway in our business, but she seemed eager and willing and most important, she was hungry.

You want your salespeople to be hungry, all the time. It seems to be the only way they can get a close. When they are fat and happy, they get careless, but when they are about to be evicted, suddenly they are closing everything in sight. Feast or famine seems to be the way it runs.

It was on the second day that I knew we had made a mistake, but I said nothing. I knew that even though this wasn’t someone I liked or that I wanted to have coffee with, if they can bring in income, the rest I can deal with.

Her first mistake was assuming that because I am packing a uterus, this gave her a “right” to get personal with me. This is a big mistake with me because regardless of my gender, I am a business owner and everything is about the bottom line. I am not there to make friends or socialize or chit-chat about my life or anyone else’s. I am paid to deliver a service to our clients and it’s my job to not only do that but to make sure everyone does.  I don’t hire people so that I can hear about their weekend or what their children are doing. I tolerate it because on some level I care but mostly because I have to.

On her second day, she was standing by the fax and started to talk to me as I was rushing out of my office. I was on an important call and I had the client on hold and needed to ask my boss a question. It was quite obvious I was in a hurry, but suddenly I heard her screech (she really did screech and shout most of the time) “SUSAN, I JUST LOVE WHAT YOU ARE WEARING! WHERE DID YOU GET IT?”  I hesitated for a moment and vaguely recall saying something about Goodwill as I turned the corner.

Later that day, she walked into my office and plopped (yes, plopped) down in a chair and had this weird look on her face. I was in the middle of sending an email and did everything I could to ignore her, but finally she said “DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE TO TALK?” and I said I did. She then began to tell me about her weekend, her children, what she had for lunch, her parents, her friends and a few other things that I managed to forget. I tried, really hard, to be interested and to look interested and I think I fooled her. She seemed to like my responses and eventually left my office grinning as I mentally snapped and snarled at her as she left.

Some of the things that happened over the next few months were:

1) Telling me, everyday, how amazing she was.

2) Giving me advice on how to deal with clients even though I had been successfully doing it for over 20 years.

3) Constant complimenting me on everything I wore even if it was a stupid outfit. To me, she acted like I walked on water.

4) Not knowing how to dress for her full figure and always wearing shirts with horizontal stripes that added another 20 pounds to her waist.

5) Yelling at my assistant when I wasn’t there.

6) Crashing her car into a tree in the parking lot one morning and didn’t think it was funny when I told her that at least her make-up didn’t smudge.

7) Telling me that my business would fail without her.

The fact that we had somehow managed for 15 years before her arrival was not a valid point. My response was “Debbie, the day my survival depends on you is the day I kill myself.” She laughed about that and told me what a wonderful sense of humor I have.

8) Wanting to talk about everything, and I mean everything. If we had a meeting and everyone was agreed, she would still come into my office and talk  ad nauseam about some minor point, over and over until I wanted to pull my hair out.

Finally one day, I had enough. I sat her down and told her “Look, when something is taken care of, there’s no reason to keep going on and on about it. If I have more I want to say, I’ll say it, but you don’t need to stress about things constantly.”

She gave me a quizzical look and I realized she didn’t know what I was talking about because she was psychotic. She had no or very little connection to what was around her. She was operating off of some idea of HOW she thought things were which had no basis in reality.

She was a psychotic bitch.

It was all so clear to me suddenly. No matter what I said or did, she would twist it. No matter how much we all tried to help her, she was going to turn every conversation into something it wasn’t and never let it go. She tried to change every successful action we had established in our business.

She was THE reason some of us women have a bad reputation because in all honesty, after being around her for a short period of time, I wanted to smack her and I’ve never been violent in my life.

I knew the bitch needed to be taken out and I was going to do it for mankind. I felt I was on an honorable mission and I wasn’t going to fail.

She was also a salesperson that couldn’t close a door and I was tired of picking up her slack. I can put up with a lot from people but the one thing I will not tolerate is incompetence. Not on my watch and not on my dollar.

I had a long talk with my boss and we decided that he would talk with her. My boss is an amazing man and one of my best friends. I would trust him with my life and he is one of the few people whose opinion I value. I also understand that I was exasperated and being a bit reactive towards her, so we talked it out. We decided that he would talk with her and see what he could do since we had invested a lot of time in her.

I was satisfied with that. The next morning, she comes into my office after talking with him and is crying. I ask her what happened and she tells me that she decided to leave and start her own business!  I sort of nodded and then suddenly she’s giving me a bear hug and telling me how much she likes me and will miss me. I was kind of pissed that she hadn’t gotten fired. I know, a bit petty, but that’s the truth.

She packed up her things with promises of staying in touch and having coffee. I smiled at the right time and nodded and when the door was closed and she was on the other side of it, I RAN into my bosses office for all the gory details.

She had been fired and had stood in front of me and lied. Flat out lied. I was tempted to run down to the parking lot and let her know that I knew she had been fired, but decided that would be just a bit too childish.

But I really wanted to do that. I really did.

To be forgotten is the worse pain of all

Posted: October 16, 2011 in Self-esteem, self-respect, Uncategorized
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I just found this out and I realize I’ve been working very hard to not know this.

Very hard. In fact, I’ve tried to not know this for the last 6 months but to no avail.

I’ve been forgotten. It’s true. It’s as if I never existed.

I’d rather be hated and yelled at than not ever be thought of again.

It’s a feeling that runs right into one’s soul and you can’t seem to get your wits around it.

You’ve tried every excuse and justification that you can think of.

1) He’s really busy and doesn’t have time.

2) He knows he blew it and doesn’t know what to do.

3) He thinks about you all the time and is afraid to call.

4) He found someone else and regrets letting you get away and is too proud to admit it.

5) He’s dead, sick, in a coma and can’t call or email.

Round and round it goes. Then you see his posting on Facebook and you know.

He’s fine and doesn’t even think about you. Hasn’t taken the time to respond to your email from a week ago and it’s not because he’s dead, it’s because he just doesn’t care.

You hate social networks and right now think they have all been created by Satan himself in order to torture all us rejected souls and try to make us do something really stupid like blasting someone with a posting or an email or start to obsessively check their page every hour of every day and constantly pull our hand away from the “send” or “enter” key.

You even start to battle the evil thoughts of hoping they are miserable or suffering some imagined disease because of their stupidity in not knowing how you really are worth everything, every sacrifice they could possibly make just to be with you or knowing that your friendship and empathy is so rare that it is to be treasured.

But you know your thoughts and feelings are just bouncing around inside your head and you’ll never speak them. Your friends think you are fine and the honest truth of the matter is, you’re tired of thinking about him and talking about him and there really isn’t anything left to say.

You’ve said it all, thought it all and cried all the tears you possibly can until you cry again. You have endless conversations with him in your head that range from pleasant and fun to you slapping him across the face for his stupidity in letting you go.

You met someone who touched your soul and was a true kindred spirit, or so you thought. When you  admit you were wrong or that it was one-sided, you cringe with embarrassment of your shattered confidence.

You vow never to make this mistake again and that’s the exact moment when you realize you are going down the wrong path. If you go down that rabbit hole then you have admitted that you aren’t worth someone’s love and attention and it will soon come to be.

You forget to tell yourself that the reason you have been forgotten is that it’s their insanity and not yours. You were the one that put yourself out there and you were the one that told them you loved them and when they said they didn’t love you back, you did the ultimate in human kindness and compassion; you continued to love them in spite of them.

You have not been forgotten. You will never be forgotten because someone as wonderful and shiny and beautiful as you will always have difficulty in finding another to love you as you deserve to be loved.

Your friends have told you, over and over, that its him and not you. You try to believe this, but they aren’t the ones sitting at home alone with no one to talk to. They may very well be right, but for right now, you are convinced that you have some unknown character flaw that no one can see but you know it’s there. Besides, they say to you what you’ve said to them. That’s what friends are for and you love them more and more for their kind words and love and the way they view you as perfect and worth all things. You know you are truly blessed.

You are on planet Earth after all and the only mistake you can really make is to stop being you and try to be what you think others want you to be.

For all of those out there, reading this post and feel forgotten by the ones we love,  just know that it’s not true. Maybe your goodness and kindness were too much for someone to handle or understand. Maybe you, like me, needed to learn this and take it to heart that those of us who love unconditionally will get smacked around and not understood by many.

But we are never forgotten. No matter what it feels like or looks like.

No one can possibly forget us.

(Yes, I have “unfriended” him, deleted his email address, phone number and picture from my phone).

Gone, but not forgotten.

Women I have known: Yolanda, Gun Runner.

Posted: October 16, 2011 in Uncategorized
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I met Yolanda when I was working with a group of women who were in jail for various reasons, from embezzlement to welfare fraud all the way up to assault with a deadly weapon. How I came to be here is covered in other posts, but there have been many women I have met in my life that for one reason or another, had a profound effect on me.

Some of them are still in my life. Others have come and gone and some of them weren’t so nice, but they changed my life and helped me to be who I am today. Flawed, smart and strong, but very far from perfect.

Yolanda was in one of my classes and always sat in the back and rarely said anything but listened intently with very little expression. She was very hard to read and get a handle on, but she always smiled and nodded her head when she came in and would often give me a “thumbs up” after class was done.

On this particular night, I had just finished up a workshop (I don’t even remember what it was about) and as I was wrapping things up, I asked the group if they had anything they wanted to say before I called it an evening.

Yolanda raised her hand but didn’t say anything. I looked up and saw her with a slight smile on her face. I was exhausted from working all day and then standing on my feet for the last two hours.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She smiled and jumped up out of her chair. “My name is Yolanda. I’ve been in here for two years and I have something I want to say.”

I heard a few chuckles but I ignored them. I was dying to find out what she wanted to say and I was pleased that someone had started the ball rolling.

“Sure Yolanda, what did you want to say?”

“I don’t want to talk in front of the group, so I was wondering if maybe I could talk to you after class.” She looked to be in her mid-30’s, brown-skinned and petite. Her teeth were crooked and she had long black hair that was pulled back in a pony tail. Her skin was clear and smooth and she had dark and dull eyes. When I looked at her, it was as if she was far away and struggling to connect with the people and things around her. She was looking straight at me but there was a lack of connection between her and I.  She could have been talking to anyone.

“Sure, that would be fine,” I said and continued to try to get the group engaged in some type of communication. It was getting late and I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was go home, sit in a hot bath and polish off a bottle of wine. The more I thought about it, the better it sounded.

I dismissed the class. No one said anything to me as the filed out, headed back to their cells and to a future that looked hopeless and bleak. I tried to imagine what that was like as I could see it on their faces. As they walked by, I looked at each one and smiled at the ones that looked at me. A few smiled back and for a moment, I could see them as children, laughing and playing and wondered what could have happened that these women ended up here. I didn’t see one glimmer of hope in any of them. I saw women who were beaten down, shuffling out of one room to go back to a cell and spend the night looking up at the ceiling, knowing the next day coming would be exactly the same as the one before and the one before that.

Yolanda came up to me and smiled. We sat down and I asked her what she wanted to say.

She told me she was only 23 and had five children, four of them in foster care. The youngest one was just a toddler that was being raised by her grandmother. The other four were spread all over California and she wanted my help in making sure they were taken care of. She wanted the foster parents to adopt four of them because it would be the best thing for them.

“Yolanda, there really isn’t anything I can do about it. I’m just here to talk to all of you and see what I can do to help you while you are here and when you are released.”

She hung her head down and started crying. Her body shook violently with each sob. I didn’t know what to do or say so I just put my arms around her shoulders and held her. She cried and cried for a long time and I let her. She would occasionally mumble about what a horrible person she was, how she had messed up so badly and that she loved her children so much that she knew the best thing was for them to have a better Mom. She broke my heart.

Finally she stopped crying, wiped her face and looked up at me.

“Yolanda, what did you do that got you here?” I asked.

“The family business. We’ve been doing the same thing my whole life. Ain’t no big deal. We run guns in and out of Mexico.  I don’t really know what I did wrong that got me here though. Just a bunch of cops showed up one day, busted down the door and arrested us. Took my kids and I’ve been here since then.” She shrugged her shoulders and she said this to me as if we were discussing a grocery list.

“Well, I see. So you got arrested for illegal activities.” I said.

A blank look came over her face. “Well, that was news to me when I got arrested.”

I felt my mouth drop open. I looked at her really hard. She was serious.

“You didn’t know it was illegal?” I asked.

“No. It’s just what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.”

Yes, it was that simple. Just didn’t know. She had never gone to school. They lived out of RV’s and had very little contact with anyone outside of the business. She was sold to men here and there whenever the family needed a little cash.

She was only doing what she knew to do. She was just like me, doing what she had to do to survive. We talked for as long as we could before she was escorted back to her cell. As she was leaving, she turned around, walked over to me and gave me a bear hug. I was stunned at the warmth that emanated from her over to me and the strength in her arms. She held on for a long time before the guard pulled her away, but even then, she had a beautiful smile on her face.

“Thank you for listening to me. I like your class,” she said as she turned the corner. I will always remember the color of her jumpsuit (bright orange so they can’t easily hide) and the spring in her step.

I drove home that night, sad and happy at the same time. I was sad that she was in such a bad position and had never known any other life and I was happy that I had been so lucky for what I had been given from the moment I was born until now. I was lucky; she was not.

I can honestly say that I never judged another person after that.

Self-esteem. Lesson #7. Knock off the drama. You’re not entitled.

Posted: October 9, 2011 in Self-esteem, self-respect, Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

This is a fairly new word that has crept into almost daily conversation.

Drama. We don’t need no stinking drama.

I hear about people not wanting it in their lives. I see it on almost every dating website profile that I have ever read.  NO DRAMA screams the words. I see people getting fired because of “the drama.” I’ve even had clients fire employees because of it. I’ve been seeing quite a bit of it on social networks.

But what does it mean now-a -days? That’s the question that has been bothering me. This word has taken on a new definition and I’m not sure what it means. But I do know what it is when I see it. Oh, it’s oh-so-clear when you see it and I think now I have a new mission in life.

Knock off all the drama. I think I now have zero tolerance for it in myself and in others. Because I’m tired of it. I’m sick of it and I’m tired of dealing with people who think they are entitled. You’re not. You never have been and you never will be.

I recently had a heart-to-heart with an employee of a client. I had been given a head’s up to try to sort this girl out because she was bringing her personal problems to work every day. Apparently she was going through a rough divorce (they’re all rough) and was sad and snappy during the day. The boss liked her enough to send her my way but had lost patience.

There were tears and justifications during the conversation. I sat. I listened. I handed her Kleenex and let her vent. Then I was done. I asked her what the hell she thought she was doing. I asked her why she acted like she did and then pointed out her job was at risk.

I wish I could have taken a picture of the look on her face when I told her that. She actually thought she could say whatever she wanted to say because she was entitled. She thought she was ENTITLED to act anyway she wanted because it was everyone else’s problem if they couldn’t deal with it. This included talking back to her boss.

She ended up getting fired because as far as she was concerned, the world evolved around her and what she wanted and what she thought and it didn’t matter what came out of her mouth, she was entitled.

She is not an isolated incident. I’ve been running into this more and more. It has been bugging me for a long time and then it hit me why someone would be so assertive to the point that they crush anyone else’s viewpoint.

They get away with it.  The more they get away with it, the more they do it. They act this way because they hate themselves and their lives so much that they lash out at anyone who doesn’t back down. Why? Because if they can take others down to their own level, it will justify their bad behavior.

It’s a very sick and twisted cycle and the more you let someone get away with it, the more they will do it.

If you actually liked yourself, you would feel no need to assert and dominate others. You would be happy and content with what other people think because you would have certainty about yourself and enough confidence to allow others to be who they are.

You want to feel better about yourself? Then stop treating others badly and having hissy fits over some imagined slight that probably never happened.

I also know when I hear someone adamant about not wanting drama in their lives, they are the first ones to dish it out, so you don’t fool me. I am just as guilty as the next person of being dramatic, but I work hard at not doing that. There are scars on my tongue from biting it and you might want to try doing that if you always feel the need to assert yourself.

The fact of the matter is, when it comes right down to it, most people don’t really care what you think. That’s a harsh reality, but if you can get your wits around it, you’ll actually be able to relax and not have everything be a battle. The people who do care about you will want to know what you think.

Good rule of thumb is not to say what you think unless you are asked.

No one is entitled to anything. Not me, not you. You are not owed anything just because you woke-up and got out of bed. I don’t care who you are.

You are not entitled to a paycheck unless you earn it.

You are not entitled to a successful relationship unless you earn it.

Your employer does not owe you anything just because you showed up for work.

You are not entitled to hurt or harm people with your words and actions. Ever. I don’t care how badly someone may be acting; you don’t get to harm them back. Treat them with as much respect as you can and then walk away. Sever the relationship if you want, but do not get dramatic.

If you care about yourself, you’ll take the high road as often as possible.

In the meantime? Yeah, you got it. Shut-up.