“Treat others how you wish to be treated,” my mother taught me, often with a tear desperately waiting to escape her lid. As a child, I would tilt my head with a bit of curiosity, and a little cluelessness when she told me her very words.

Today, I thank her in silence.

She helped me to float, but I had to teach myself to swim. Respect is not handling disrespect. I learned to fight my own battles, rather than bathing in them. If you bathe yourself in your battles, you reflect them onto others. You receive what you give. You attract what you avoid. What comes around goes around. Karma will always make its way around.

This doesn’t necessarily just mean if you perform poorly, you will have poor results. Rather if you treat yourself poorly, you will. In my experience, I grew up as a people pleaser. I took my mother’s guidance for granted, and put the security of others before my own. I treated others how I wished my father treated me as a child. My mother told me to “Treat others how you wish to be treated,” not how I wish he had.

The universe will teach you what you are yet to learn, or what doesn’t serve you. The lesson I received was my Sophomore year of Kennett High School. I grasped my chest, holding my new wounded heart with its unbandaged childhood scars. I breathed in and out the child within me into the present.

No matter how much you know yourself, or present yourself, people will always have a perception of you. That is their own struggle to strangle, and karma will come full circle.