During my senior year of high school, a friend of mine told me "sometimes it's okay to be selfish, sometimes you need to be" and this is possibly the most valuable piece of advice I have received in my entire life. I think it is important for everyone to realize this. My entire life I worked so hard to be as selfless as possible, even giving up my own happiness and self worth in the process, and until my friend said this to me, I never realized how detrimental that mindset was. It is absolutely necessary to live your life selfishly, as long as it is for the improvement of your quality of life. Don't take this to mean that you can go steal from a store because it will make your life better, because that's not what I mean. What I mean is that when you are surrounded by people who don't love you and don't care about your life and you are struggling and nobody is noticing, it is okay to be selfish and take care of yourself, even if that means leaving behind those that were hurting you. An important part of living selfishly is also learning to not apologize for who you are, and this is the part I am just now learning (and perfecting). Sure, you can live selfishly, but it doesn't matter if you apologize for everything you are and everything you do every minute of every day. You have to truly believe that you deserve to be selfish, and that includes getting rid of that feeling of guilt for who you are. Stop apologizing for who you are, because who you are is not a crime. In order to truly be happy, you have to focus on you and what you need, and that is all that matters. Your mental health is much more important than anyone else's comfort. You are going to lose friends along the way, take it from someone who has lost a plethora of friends along the same path. But that is okay. That is part of life and it is going to hurt and it is going to make you doubt this entire life philosophy, but in the end, those friends you lose, were never truly your friends. Friends understand when you need to focus on yourself, friends allow you and help you improve your mental health, friends don't guilt you for taking "me time", and friends don't make you hate yourself for focusing on your happiness. If you lose any friends in the process, it is a blessing in disguise. No matter which pieces of this advice you take, I want every one who reads this to remember that they are allowed to be selfish. You are allowed to change things in your life you don't like, even if that means leaving friends behind. You are in control of your life, stop letting the fear of what others think and feel take the wheel. Only you decide what happens in this life, so take control of it, be selfish, and make this life what you want it to be and what you deserve it to be.