I've always worried a lot about what other people think of me. Friends, family member, co-workers, boyfriends. I've wasted more time trying to get into other people's heads, trying to understand what motivates them, trying to manage their perception of me. So when I heard the recovery saying "what other people think of me is none of my business", I just loved it. Somehow it had never occurred to me that I could just keep on being me no matter what other people thought--that I existed outside of other people's perceptions! What a relief to just be able to focus on myself, to trust that I had a core of beliefs and values that I could always fall back on, even during tough times when people I cared about didn't treat me the way I wanted. These days I try to stop myself when I start spiraling out into trying to read people's minds or manage their perceptions of me. The truth is that I will never really know what goes on in other people's heads, even the people who are closest to me, and they have a right to feel however they want. So I try to focus on myself, which was really the only thing I could ever control. I've learned that so long as I feel good about how I behave and how I am in the world, ultimately it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.