They say the way we see and perceive things in life reflects who we are as people. Optimistic people tend to find themselves surrounded by positivity. People who carry negative thoughts constantly question, doubt, and anticipate what could go wrong. We describe these as personality traits, almost as if they are permanent parts of who we are. But are they really constant? Or are they variable — shaped by what we experience, who we are surrounded by, and where we happen to be standing in life?
It is easy to sit in a room and give advice when you are not the one being judged.
It is easy to tell someone to be positive when you are not the person carrying the weight.
Easy to say everything will be okay when your own life feels stable.
But what happens when the circumstances change?
I don’t think anyone’s journey from birth to death is entirely blissful, nor anyone’s entirely misery. Every living being experiences some version of both joy and pain. What differs is how we experience it. How we face our fears. How we respond to challenges. Who stands beside us. Who walks away. And perhaps most importantly — who we become when life stops going according to plan. That is the real test.
The Breaking Point
There have been periods in my life that felt less like chapters and more like a series of tests. Some of those gates felt as though they were made of iron. The amount of stress and pain — physical, emotional, psychological — was sometimes difficult to comprehend while I was living through it. At the time I wasn’t thinking about what the experience would teach me. I was thinking about how to get through the next day.
When you reach a particular low point, your mind becomes a strange place.
You replay conversations.
You question decisions.
You look for the mistakes you might have made.
You wonder what you could have done differently.
And sometimes, more than anything else, you simply wish someone were there. Not to fix anything. Just to listen. To sit with you without judgment.
That wish stays a wish more often than not. And when you accept that — really accept it — something quiet shifts.
You learn to sit with yourself.
You learn to listen to yourself.
You learn that you can survive things you once thought would finish you.
And eventually you begin believing in yourself.
Not because you made some deliberate choice to stop depending on people. But because circumstances left you with very little other option.You learn to believe in yourself because there was nobody else in the room to believe in you.
At first, that can feel pathetic. It can feel lonely. It can feel like failure. But perhaps that is the uncomfortable territory where some of the most important lessons are learned. A life lesson isn’t always a profound realization delivered at exactly the right moment. It doesn’t come with advance notice. Sometimes life simply puts you in a situation where there is no other option. And you learn because you have to.
You learn to believe in yourself just because there was nobody else in the room to believe in you.
The Granary
I had heard variations of these sayings growing up in Nepal. Words from parents and elders, passed down almost like instructions for living. At the time they sounded like just that — words, distant echoes of a culture I took for granted. Returning to them in isolation, years later, I realized they were not instructions. They were warnings encoded in language.
There is a classic Nepali saying:
छैनन् गेडी सबै तेरी।” “Chan gedi sabai meri, chainan gedi sabai teri.” When there is grain, everyone is mine. When there is none, everyone is yours.
Gedi means grain — kernels. That is how wealth used to be counted before it was counted in money. The older version of this saying is simpler, and colder: when the granary is full, the whole village is mine. When it is empty, I belong to no one.
If you have lived in both states — full and empty — the saying stops sounding like a proverb.
It starts sounding like an observation.
Hard times have a strange way of making relationships clearer. When you are doing well — independent, able to give, able to participate, keeping up with everyone else’s life — people gravitate toward you naturally. There is nothing wrong with that. It is just how it works. But then life changes. And the people you thought were always around become difficult to reach.
The difference isn’t that they suddenly got busier. It’s that you were no longer part of what they were prioritizing.
Reciprocity theory in social psychology (Gouldner, 1960) describes how relationships are often maintained through an implicit exchange of resources — time, help, presence, status. When one person’s resources decline, the perceived value of the relationship can shift for the other party — not always consciously, but measurably. Research on social support networks shows that people with fewer resources consistently receive less support precisely when they need it most, a phenomenon sometimes called the Matthew Effect in social relationships: to those who have, more is given.
You Know Your Friends When You Have Nothing to Offer
I am saying this from my own experience, not as a general observation. People who could clear an evening, take time off work, manage their schedules to travel, go on vacations, or spend an entire night at a Taylor Swift concert with incredible seats — somehow became difficult to reach during one of the hardest periods of my life.
Living on ramen for weeks, close to running out of dog food, I swallowed my pride and sent a text asking for help. It took two days to get a response.
A job interview — arguably the most important thing happening in my life at that moment — lost priority to a free community Zumba class.
I am not making that up. That is what happened. I say it not to shame anyone but because specifics matter. Vague descriptions of disappointment are easy to dismiss. That detail is not.
The Night Before the Drive
The moment that stays with me most happened the night before I was supposed to drive out of state. Life had not been getting better where I was, I had already given notice on my apartment, the plan was set. Then my car broke down — a manufacturer’s recall issue, the entire engine needed replacing, no quick fix. I had no time to wait. I would have no place to stay.
I asked, as casually as I could, whether there was any possibility of cosigning to help me get another car if I needed to go that route. The response didn’t require any thought. The answer was that their family would not agree to it, and besides, they were planning to buy a house soon so it wasn’t a good time.
No second thought. No sitting with it. Just a reason that closed the door immediately.
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying anyone was obligated to cosign anything. I’m saying that the speed and certainty of the no — and the reasoning behind it — told me something about where I stood. The house they were planning to buy as a reason they couldn’t help me not become homeless was a particular kind of response. One I didn’t forget.
It has been over three years since that night. I have a full-time job, a good salary, and a brand new car I bought myself. They are still not homeowners. I don’t say that to be cruel. I say it because life doesn’t move in the straight line that people assume when they are deciding who is worth investing in and who isn’t. That transactional calculation is based on a snapshot of the present, failing to account for the human capacity for resilience and adaptation.
Status Imbalance Breeds Disrespect
There is a pattern I have come to recognize that goes beyond individual moments. When someone begins to believe they are doing better in life than you are, the relationship can quietly change. Not dramatically. Just a slight shift in tone. A little less patience. A little more certainty in how they speak to you. A little less consideration for how things land.
Growing up where respect is a core value — not a nicety, but something foundational to how you were raised and how relationships were understood — you become calibrated to notice even the smallest shift in it. That’s not sensitivity. That’s just accurate reading. Where I come from, disrespect doesn’t have to be loud to be real. A certain tone, a certain assumption in how someone addresses you, tells you everything about how they currently see you.
When someone begins to feel they have moved ahead and you have not, respect can start quietly disappearing. And once that happens in a friendship, it rarely comes back to what it was.
Social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) describes how people evaluate their own circumstances partly through comparison with those around them. When a status gap widens between two people in a relationship, research shows it can trigger what psychologists call benign envy in the person falling behind — but also something less discussed: contempt in the person pulling ahead. Contempt, even mild and unconscious, is one of the strongest predictors of relationship deterioration. Unlike anger or frustration, which still imply the other person matters, contempt signals a fundamental downgrade in how someone is valued.
Character Only Shows Under Pressure
A person can appear incredibly compassionate when compassion costs them nothing.
Loyal when loyalty is convenient.
Generous when generosity doesn’t require any real sacrifice.
These qualities feel real — and in those conditions, they probably are real. But they haven’t been tested yet.
The test is what happens when being a good friend requires actual inconvenience. When showing up means rearranging something. When helping means taking a risk. When staying means choosing someone who currently has nothing to offer you over something easier.
That is when character becomes visible. Not when everything is easy. When it isn’t.
I saw the signs long before I finally accepted it and let go. The words and actions weren’t always aligned. The availability changed gradually. The effort became one-sided. I still wanted to give the benefit of the doubt and had raised my concerns directly — laid out my observations, and even asked if I had done something wrong unintentionally. The response I got was that I was reading too much into it. That the message was received as a drunk text.
A convenient, dismissive label applied to avoid accountability for a difficult truth. A long, carefully written message about the state of a friendship — received as a drunk text. That told me everything I needed to know about the foundation of that connection.
I don’t think the lesson from all of this is simply that people disappoint you. That’s too easy and too cynical. The bigger thing I’ve come to understand is that positions change. The person who is strong today may need help tomorrow. The person who is struggling today may become the one everyone else turns to. Life doesn’t move in the straight line that people assume when they’re deciding who deserves their time. I’ve become less interested in judging where someone is in life and more interested in watching how they behave while they are there. Because character isn’t what you show when it costs you nothing. It’s what remains when it does.
