The person making your life harder isn’t always your ex, your boss, your parents, or your enemies
Sometimes, it’s you.
And I don’t say that to be mean.
I’ve made dumb decisions too. We all have.
Being intelligent doesn’t make you immune to self-sabotage.
You can have degrees, run a business, give everybody fantastic advice, and still occasionally look back at your own decisions and think, “Girl… what were you doing?”
6 Dumb Things Women Do That Secretly Ruin Their Lives
1. Waiting for Someone Else to Rescue Them
One of the biggest lies many women grow up believing is that someday, someone will come and fix everything.
Maybe a husband or a rich boyfriend.
Even God sometimes gets turned into an excuse for doing nothing.
“I’m waiting for my breakthrough.”
Sis, while you’re waiting, life is waiting too.
Of course, people can help you and marriage can improve your life, but nobody should be the entire plan.
I know women who have postponed their dreams because they believe marriage is around the corner.
They tell themselves they’ll start the business after they get married or travel when someone pays for it.
Then years pass, and nothing changes.
One of the most attractive qualities in anyone is seeing them build a beautiful life with whatever they already have.
Don’t sit on your potential waiting for a savior.
If help comes, fantastic.
If it doesn’t, you should still be moving.
2. Staying Too Long in Bad Relationships Because of Potential
I know loneliness is not cute.
Trust me, I understand.
There are days when being single feels like everyone else got picked except you.
Your friends are changing their surnames, and babies are arriving.
The pressure is real.
But do you know what’s worse than being lonely?
Being lonely while lying next to the wrong person.
Potential has trapped more women than prison bars ever could.
“He’ll change.”
“He wasn’t like this when we met.”
Maybe. And maybe not.
You cannot build your future on who someone might become.
Build it on who they consistently are.
I’ve seen women waste their twenties, their thirties, and even their forties waiting for a man to become who they imagined in their heads instead of accepting the person standing right in front of them.
Love the man who exists, not the project you’ve created in your imagination.
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is walk away before another year of your life disappears waiting for tomorrow to become different from yesterday.
3. Caring Too Much About What Other People Think
One of the most expensive mistakes a woman can make is living her life for an audience that isn’t even paying attention.
It’s exhausting.
You want to post videos, move to another city, break up with a useless man, start a business, whatever it is you wanna do…
But then that little voice whispers, “What will people think?”
Meanwhile, the same people you’re trying so hard to impress are busy living their own lives.
And the few who are talking?
Give them two days. They’ll move on to the next person’s business.
One lesson adulthood has taught me is that people will judge you no matter what.
You literally cannot win.
So you might as well make decisions that make sense for your own life.
Don’t let strangers who won’t pay your bills decide how you should live.
4. Comparing Their Lives to Social Media
Social media has broken celebrities’ monopoly on making us feel inadequate.
Back in the day, you mostly compared yourself to people on TV and in magazines.
Now, you can wake up peacefully, pick up your phone, and before you’ve even brushed your teeth, somebody your age has bought a house, and your former classmate is announcing that she made her first million.
Meanwhile, you’re wondering what to eat for breakfast.
The problem with social media is that you’re comparing the entirety of your life to carefully selected moments from someone else’s.
You see the new car, but you don’t see the loan.
You see the beautiful body. You don’t know how much work, editing, genetics, or sometimes surgery went into it.
And if you’re not careful, you’ll start looking at a perfectly decent life and thinking something is wrong with it.
Comparison doesn’t only make you jealous of other people; it makes you ungrateful for things you once prayed for.
I’m not saying everything online is fake.
Some people truly have an enviable life, but you’re still seeing a fraction of the story.
Let social media inspire you if it can, but the moment scrolling regularly leaves you feeling like your own life isn’t enough, put the phone down.
5. Neglecting Their Health While Taking Care of Everyone Else
Within the last 48 hours, I’ve baked meat pies, bread, and dinner rolls, and made Greek yogurt…
At this point, I’m one apron away from opening a bakery.
And while I enjoy doing these things for my family, it reminds me of something we women are good at: taking care of everybody while we put ourselves last.
You’re exhausted, but you keep going.
You haven’t exercised in forever, and surviving on five hours of sleep.
You’re stressed beyond belief, but because the house hasn’t collapsed and everybody else is okay, you convince yourself that you’re okay too.
Please, stop doing that.
Your body is not a machine you can keep running without maintenance.
Taking care of your health isn’t selfish.
In fact, if you’re the person everybody depends on, that’s even more reason to take yourself seriously.
There’s no trophy for being the woman who did everything for everybody while running herself into the ground.
The people you love need you, yes.
But you need you too.
6. Believing They’re “Too Old” to Start Over
Go through the comments on female celebrities’ social media pages, and you’ll see some of the most disgusting comments, mostly from men, age-shaming women for having the audacity to age.
This is part of the reason so many women become terrified of getting older.
Society has spent years selling us the ridiculous idea that a woman’s value has an expiry date.
And unfortunately, some women believe it.
If you’re 45 and the thing you want will take five years, you’ll be 50 in five years whether you do it or not.
You might as well arrive at 50 having done the thing.
Of course, age changes some things.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending you’re exactly the same person at 55 as you were at 20.
Different seasons come with different realities, but different doesn’t mean useless.
And older doesn’t mean over.
One of the dumbest things you can do is spend the second half of your life mourning the fact that the first half has already happened.
You cannot go back and start at 25.
Fine.
Start now.
Start embarrassed and afraid.
Start while people are asking why you’re bothering “at your age.”
I’d rather be the oldest person in the room learning something new than the woman sitting at home with a dream she buried because somebody convinced her that ambition belongs to young people.
As long as you’re alive, your life is still happening.
Don’t declare yourself finished while you’re still here.
One of the privileges of getting older is being able to look back at some of your decisions and say, “Wow. That was dumb.”
But that’s also growth.
The goal isn’t to become a woman who never makes mistakes.
Good luck with that.
The goal is to become a woman who doesn’t keep making the same mistake because admitting she was wrong hurts her ego.