Your friends can help you with your homework. Your friends can be there to hug you or make you laugh or get you impossibly drunk when you’re dealing with a heartbreaking problem. Your friends can offer you advice and a really good friend will be around to guide you and push you forward when you don’t think you can go any further.

But at the end of the day, your friends cannot solve your problems for you. They cannot magically take all your issues and insecurities and make them disappear for you. No one can do that for you except YOU.

I’ve had my fair share of whining and being all-around annoyingly hopeless. I’ve pestered my friends time and time again to tell me what to do, and I have some friends who have amazingly sat through countless bitchfits about stuff that I could have done something about as opposed to sitting around and moaning about. But now I’ve realized that there comes a time when you can count on a saviour and there are times when you have to save yourself. It’s like stopping to ask for directions and then disregarding them and going down another road completely. It’s stupid and pointless.

It’s perfectly normal to be down sometimes. It’s human to be sad. But it’s like this…you can either wallow in self pity for the rest of your life or you can get up and keep moving. You can drown in depression or you can go out and search for what makes you happy. In the end, it comes down to you. We were given free will for a reason. We were given the ability to make a choice for a reason.

And you’re never going to learn to work out your own issues and sort yourself out if you keep hiding behind your bitching and your delusions and your constant proclaimations of how sad your life is while you sit in privileges that were handed to you. I’ve met people who have a lot less than you but who can deal with so much more and they can still walk away from the daily tragedies of life with a smile on their face and the assurance that they can make it.

Your friends will always care, but you gotta keep this in mind: you’re not the only one that has shit to deal with in this world, and maybe it’s high time to make a change in how you treat the people around you AND YOURSELF if you want them to stick around.