You know what I’ve been thinking about recently?

If you can learn not to be affected by everyone else’s opinions, the noise, the comments, the endless stream of people telling you what to think, how to live and who you should be, I honestly think you’re winning. It’s a superpower.

Not becoming completely immune to other people, because we’re human and things will still hurt sometimes. But being able to hear someone’s opinion without automatically absorbing it as the truth? That’s freedom.

I think that’s partly why I dislike social media more and more. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great accounts, and I do still occasionally find myself scrolling through Instagram. But nowhere near as much as I used to. Now, when I catch myself doing it, I often think: God, they’re sucking you in again.

Because you can’t really be present in your own life while you’re endlessly scrolling through someone else’s. You’re consuming opinions you didn’t ask for, worrying about things that may not even be real and comparing your actual, complicated life with a carefully edited version of somebody else’s. It drags you away from reality. Away from the people sitting beside you. Away from the things that are genuinely meaningful. It’s almost like handing your attention, and therefore some of your power, to complete strangers.

And I don’t want to do that anymore. I’ve also realised that I don’t have to be influenced by every silly or thoughtless comment somebody makes. You know when someone says something and you carry it around with you afterwards? You replay it in your mind. You analyse what they meant. You wonder whether it says something about you. But why?

Seriously, they're just another person with thousands of thoughts rushing around inside their head. They have their own insecurities, bad moods, experiences, assumptions and distorted ways of seeing things, just as we all do. If what they say is unkind or negative, it's often far more revealing of what's happening inside them than it is of anything happening inside you.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Of course it does. I used to let things like that really affect me, and I still do sometimes. But the more I step away from the noise and learn to listen to myself, the more I realise that people are simply human. Completely imperfect humans who sometimes say stupid things.

One person says something that isn’t true to another person, and that person takes it deeply personally, as though this random comment somehow represents who they are. But it doesn’t. It’s one person’s thought. That’s all. And thoughts aren’t facts. They’re often fleeting, irrational and shaped by things we know absolutely nothing about.

We can waste so much energy wondering why somebody behaved a certain way, what they meant or what they must think of us. But most of the time, we’re only guessing. We have no idea what's going on inside somebody else’s head, so why spend hours trying to live in there?

Let them think what they think. Let them misunderstand you. Let them make whatever assumptions they want to make. You don’t have to explain yourself to everyone, defend yourself against every opinion or carry every careless comment home with you.

You can simply decide: this doesn’t belong to me. I’m not going to take it personally. I’m not going to spend any more of my energy analysing it. I’m going to return my attention to my own life, the real one happening right in front of me. Because your attention is valuable. Your peace is valuable. Your time is valuable.

And the moment you stop allowing every outside opinion to disturb your inner world, life becomes so much lighter. People can think what they like. You’ve got a life to live. 🩷