What are the biggest things you’ve learned in life thus far?

For some reason, I thought I’ve written many posts on this topic over the years but I could only find 2 posts and both happened to be asking the same question, which wasn’t this one.

Of the two posts, I like this one better, in which I wrote:

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my 30 years on Earth is you cannot count on anyone but yourself.

I even included this quote with that post:

I think that’s quite close to the life lesson Sadje wrote in her post as well and I agree absolutely, you can’t put expectation on anyone, not friends, not family, and I might even add, not even myself. We can only hope that everything will turn out okay and not what we want in the end. The downside to this is it makes asking for help much harder.

In past posts, I wrote about how I need to work on asking for help. I’m still working on that. It’s not easy, particularly because I learned this lesson at a young age. It’s why I try to make everything easier for others because I can never expect others to put the same level of effort as I do. It’s the whole reason why I chose to bury ollas (unglazed terra cotta clay pots) in the garden and setting up drip irrigation, so I would never need to ask for help with watering.

What are the lessons life has taught you? What advantage you’ve gained by learning these lessons?

The advantage I’ve gained by learning these lessons is that I rarely need to count on anyone. The people that’s in my life now, aside from my co-workers, often seem to only bring headaches and heartaches. They disappoint me over and over because of their halfhearted efforts and annoyance.

Like each time I must reluctantly ask my mom for help, I would have to either brace for lecture, interrogation, or deny help altogether. So eventually, I had to learn to do everything myself and count on one because in my experience, people will either deny me help or only help halfheartedly, either way, it will end in disappointment, so why bother?