It’s true that we can never choose our life or what happens to us. No one wants their mother to hit them or their dad to leave them, but it happens and for me, the only thing I can do is change my own future. My past was hard and I pushed a lot of memories in the back burner, but I’ve grown so much from the ashes of what was once the young me. I’ve rose from the grave of lost memories but I haven’t reached my highest potential yet.

Some people never change but my perspective of the world can. If I can learn to be less cold and distant, maybe I’ll warm up to people a little bit.

I can never change the way people will treat me but I can change the way I treat myself and how I react from it. As much as I want to do certain things, I know I can’t. It’s malicious and wrong – revenge never solves anything but builds more hatred and animosity. The day I learn to forgive is the day my whole life will change.

For a large chunk of my life, I strongly believed in karma. “You get what you deserve.” “Karma will bite you in the ass someday.” Any of these sound familiar?

If someone treated me in a bad way, I told myself that karma will get them, making it even, and somehow that thought made me feel better, back then anyway. On the other side, whenever something misfortunate came my way, I thought, “This is karma for doing [something irrelevant] beforehand.” But as I think deeper about the series of events that occurred in my life, karma really doesn’t make sense or exist at all. There are questions where karma cannot ever be the answer.

What did I do to receive the abandonment of my father when I was just born? Where’s karma now to put the person who molested me in jail? Did the person who robbed my house two years ago ever get their own house robbed, too? What about the person who threatened my mother with a knife? My little sister, what did she do, as a young kid, to get holes in her heart?

Saying “karma will get them back” is the lazy way out. Shit happens because that’s life. Life isn’t always going to be perfect. There are people who have committed crimes who live life prison-free. There will be people, who are angels on Earth, who get cancer and pass away. There are many good deeds that go unnoticed and wrongdoings that go unpunished.

Bad things happen to everyone. But life isn’t all bad – there are good things that happen, and karma isn’t the reason why those events take place. People who do good things because they think they’ll get “good karma” back aren’t doing good at all. There’s greed behind their actions, a desire to receive something back, and there lies the secret intentions. I truly believe that if you do something nice, you cannot expect something back and it must be out of pure generosity, and if not, are you really doing good? Think about it. This pop culture definition of karma doesn’t exist and it’s not real. At least, not in my world.

Karma won’t save or help you with your desired revenge or expected rewards – be your own hero and save the day by making it better, not bitter.