When I think about myself at the beginning of 2017 and when I think about myself now, the difference is crazy. I never really reflect on myself and think about how much I’ve changed, so now that I am, it’s so weird to think about how much time can change things.

I always catch myself thinking about whether 2017 was a good year or a bad year. Honestly, it was both. This year, I went through a lot of things that I wouldn’t label good, and I lost a lot of people that were really close to me. However, because of these things, I was able to improve myself. I learned how to deal with things as they come and I learned that people come into your life for a reason, but that doesn’t mean your relationship with them will have a positive outlook.

One of the most important lesson I learned this year is to always have your own back. Create a good relationship with yourself and really get to know who you are. What makes you happy, what do you like to do? It is essential that you know yourself and love yourself because that way, if you end up losing people, you can never lose yourself. Often times we are our own worst enemy. We are so hard on ourselves. We tell ourselves we don’t look good, we’re not smart enough, we don’t have enough friends…when more often than not, the things we tell ourselves aren’t even true.

Another thing I learned was to know the limits in every situation. For instance, if someone is trying to leave your life, there’s only so much you can do. Begging that person to stay shouldn’t be one of them. Again, having a good relationship with yourself is key to achieve this because you will have respect for yourself and know that you’re worth more than that. You also have to know the limit of pushing yourself. You can study for hours, work out until you faint, try endlessly to fix every problem you think your life has, but at the end of the day, you have a limit. Everyone has a breaking point. You can only work yourself so much before you reach that.

Finally, I learned to set goals for myself. For the first time in my life, I completed everything on my “new year’s resolution” list. This is because I didn’t put things on the list like “go skydiving” or “travel the world.” I put down real life, realistic things that I actually thought would benefit me as a person. And I achieved all of them. As the new year approaches, I challenge everybody to set real goals that are possible, because it feels so good knowing you accomplished what you wanted to and that you really changed over the span of a year.