By Hannah Brenchner
People are going to try to take the wins away from you. It’s just what people do when they aren’t happy with themselves. They try to suck, suck, suck the joy from somebody else. They say when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Some people won’t. Some people utterly despise lemonade. They spend the best hours of their day hurling rotten lemons at all the people out there running the race, and I can only imagine what a miserable hobby that is. To be on the sidelines with a bunch of rotten lemons and no real skin in the game.

These people are often living in the comments section on blogs or giving one-star reviews on Amazon. They’re found angry-tweeting or cutting people off at red lights for no good reason. And it would be easy to expend all your energy on trying to figure out why they are the way they are, but that would only take away from why you’re here today.

A couple of years ago, someone sent me an anonymous email with a link to a blog they’d created. Simply put, this blog was dedicated to telling the internet about how much I sucked (their words, not mine). Yes, this person dedicated hours of their life to creating a blog about why I was an awful human being. There were about a dozen posts, and a new one coming every time I pressed Publish on my blog. This person would attack my words, my content, and my character. They did this for a long time, and they kept sending emails to make sure I got the memo.

My “big sister” advice would be to tell you not to focus on the critics, but there is a chance you’re going to have to feel the pain for yourself before you decide to turn the other cheek. It’s like telling someone to stay away from the fire. We all need to figure out how the burn feels on our skin...read more