“Stop offering your words. That is ‘do not cast pearls before swine’. A very very harsh statement, right? But what it means is, if you are offering words of wisdom to someone in a genuine attempt to help, and they treat that with contempt, then shut up!” Jordan B. Peterson

One of the wisest statements I ever heard. And because it is so true, it is so difficult to implement. If we genuinely care about someone, then we will not leave them to suffer alone. We will try repeatedly to offer help. We will try many different approaches and still get no results whatsoever. To make things even worse, that person may accuse us of being annoying and oblivious to their struggle, which will inevitably hurt us if we truly love that person. Then we cave in and start thinking it was our fault that led to this. It was our ignorance that prevented us from helping those who needed help.

There is no simple solution for this. What I learned is that we cannot help someone who does not want to be helped. It is just like that. Those people may be complaining about everything in their lives, and when we offer solutions, they hate us for some reason. But what else can we do?! We cannot fight someone else’s battles. Those who do not want to be lifted up will eventually drag us down into misery because we cannot leave them to suffer alone. Maybe we have to walk away from them. Maybe we need to think of our own lives. Maybe if that person took the responsibility of his/her own life, things would be so much less hellish. All we can do is offer support even if it is a simple word of kindness to that person.

It all comes down to gratitude. If you have someone who is literally always trying to cheer you up when you are upset. If that person is genuinely happy when you smile, then there is nothing more in this world that you can wish for in the moment of despair. You can never be grateful enough for such a person. But the problem with the people who do not want to be rescued is that they just do not realise how valuable those people are until they lose them (or maybe not even after that). Because people do not have infinite patience. No matter how much we love someone, if they keep on treating us badly when all we are doing is tearing our hearts open to contain them, eventually, we will get fed up and start feeling disgusted by everything that person does. Maybe taking on the responsibility for our own actions without exemption is the key to life.