Walk a Mile in My Shoes Before You Give Me Advice

For a long time, I made myself convenient for everyone. I stayed quiet. I swallowed my feelings. I tried not to take up too much space. I was the kind of person who could easily disappear into the background. Countless painful experiences and years of working on myself shaped me into the person I am today. I stopped caring so much about what people might say. I stopped putting other people’s wants above my own. I stopped trying to be easy to deal with. Now I like talking about the things that trigger people. I like saying the truths everyone else prefers to leave unspoken.

I am still working on myself, of course. That kind of work never really ends—unless you die, lol. Recently, I realized something else about myself. Something I am now actively trying to change. I noticed how often I used to stay silent when someone hurt me. It was easier to turn around and disappear from that person’s life than to confront them directly. I would keep everything inside until I reached my breaking point, and only then would I finally say what I thought. Whenever there was a chance to avoid direct conflict, I usually took it. Not because I was incapable of standing up for myself, but because silence often felt easier.

Except silence was never really easier. All the things I did not say had nowhere to go. The anger, disappointment, and resentment simply accumulated inside me, and in the end, I was the one carrying all of it. Now I do things differently. Even when I could stay silent, I choose not to. I speak up. I say what I think. And I have already started seeing the positive results of doing that. Having a blog helps too—especially when you cannot say something directly to the person’s face, lol.

And one of the things I no longer want to stay silent about is people who constantly offer advice no one asked for. People who immediately start lecturing you or sharing their personal wisdom as though their experience must somehow be relevant to your life. What makes you think anyone needs it? I certainly do not. Why do you assume you know better? Because you are older? Because you have children? Does that automatically make you wiser? Does it guarantee that you have more life experience than the person standing in front of you?

It irritates me when people see a young woman and immediately decide she has not experienced real life yet. You have no idea what someone has survived simply by looking at them. You know almost nothing about my life. You know only what I have chosen to tell you and what I have allowed you to see. I have walked a road that many people would not have been able to handle. So before you decide to lecture me, walk a mile in my shoes. I doubt you would still have much to say afterward.

So many people rush to give advice without even understanding that just because something worked for them—or for someone they know—does not mean it will work for everyone. We are not built the same way. We carry different energy. We respond to different patterns. What opens one person’s path may completely block someone else’s.

For example, I have noticed a very clear pattern in my own life when it comes to money. Whenever I save money without a specific purpose—simply so it can sit somewhere, whether as cash or in an interest-bearing account—my financial flow seems to slow down. Money stops coming in as easily. My income drops. Eventually, I begin to panic.

I experienced this once when I was living in Prague, and it happened again very recently. It was not because I had forgotten what happened before. This time, I assumed the situation was different because the money was earning interest. I thought that because it was technically working, it was not simply sitting there. Apparently, that distinction did not matter for me. The problem was not whether the money was earning interest. The problem was that it had no purpose.

When I save toward something specific, the pattern feels completely different. When the money has a clear destination, I do not experience the same sense of stagnation. This is not a universal law. I am not claiming that everyone should spend their savings or that keeping money in the bank blocks abundance. This is simply a pattern I have observed repeatedly in my own life. It is personal to me.

And that is exactly why I would never go around telling people, “Spend your money and more will come.” There is a very good chance that it would not work for them at all. My experience is not an instruction manual for someone else’s life. So why are so many people convinced that theirs is? Why do people assume that their advice is automatically valuable simply because it comes from them?

Sometimes advice is not wisdom. Sometimes it is just another person projecting their life onto yours.