On writing your own guiding principles — and finally living by them
I used to hate rules.
Not mildly dislike them — genuinely resent them. Rules felt like small cages built by other people to contain me. The rules of childhood. The rules of the classroom. The unwritten, unspoken office rules that somehow everyone was expected to know and follow and usually benefit someone else’s comfort at the expense of your own.
So, when I tell you I sat down one day and wrote myself a set of rules to live by, I want you to understand how far I had to travel to get there.
Because here’s what I finally understood: we are already living by rules. All of us. Every day. We just didn’t write them. Someone else did — our families, our cultures, our workplaces, our insecurities, the unexamined fears we inherited and never thought to question. We have been obeying rules our entire lives. The only question is whose rules they are.
I decided it was time to write my own.
I. THE REFRAME
Rules That Liberate Instead of Limit
These new rules are not about restriction. They are not punishment. They are not a list of things I am no longer allowed to do, handed down from some self-improvement guru who has never met me and knows nothing about my life.
They are guiding principles. Written by me, for me, from the truest and most self-respecting part of myself — the part that has watched me stumble over the same obstacles repeatedly and finally said: enough. We know better now. Let’s act like it.
“These rules are non-negotiable. I do not need to explain them to anyone. They are my life oxygen.”
They came from honest self-examination. From looking at the areas of my life where I kept losing energy, kept giving too much, kept absorbing things I should have declined at the door. From asking, without softening the answer: where do I keep letting myself down? Where do I keep allowing others to take more than they give?
The answers became my rules.
II. THE RULES
Written From a Place of Love and Self-Respect
Here are the rules I wrote for myself. I share them not because they should be yours, but because seeing someone else’s might help you find your own.
Rule 1 — I am a complaint-free woman.
I was spending enormous energy complaining about colleagues, situations, things I could not change. I was not solving anything. I was not feeling better. I was simply rehearsing my frustration until it became the loudest voice in the room. I decided to redirect that energy entirely: toward what I can change, what I can do, what I can build. Complaining was costing me more than I realized.
Rule 2 — I protect my mornings and my nights.
There are certain people in my life — family, people I love — whose energy I cannot absorb at the beginning or end of my day without it coloring everything. I cannot cut ties. But I can choose when and how I will engage. My first and last hours belong to me. That boundary is quiet, private, and absolute.
Rule 3 — I let it go. I let it be.
Resentment is a weight I decided I could no longer afford to carry. Not because the people who hurt me deserved to be released from my memory, but because I deserved to be released from carrying them. Holding on was keeping me earthbound. Letting go was the only way to fly.
Rule 4 — I am everything God says about me. Nothing less.
My worth is not an opinion. It is not up for negotiation, not dependent on who is in the room, not something that fluctuates based on someone else’s mood or approval. I remind myself of this daily — not because I always feel it, but because the repetition slowly builds the truth into the body until the mind stops arguing.
Rule 5 — My money, my values, my decision.
I spent years contributing to social obligations that felt misaligned with who I am and what I care about. Giving out of guilt, out of social pressure, out of fear of being seen as selfish. Now I have clear principles for when I give, how I give, and why. Generosity aligned with my values feels expansive. Generosity coerced by obligation feels like hemorrhaging.
Rule 6 — When someone shows me who they are, I believe them.
This one took the longest, because I am an empath — and empaths are fluent in potential. We see who someone could be and love them toward it, often long past the point where the evidence has made the verdict clear. Now, the moment someone clearly shows me their character, I receive that information without bargaining with it. I do not need to understand your trauma to recognise that I cannot be its home.
III. THE DEEPEST RULE
Me First. Without Apology.
I need to say something that took me a very long time to be able to say without feeling guilty about it.
I spent years — not months, years — as the person who showed up. The good friend. The patient one. The one who listened for hours to other people’s pain. The one who lent money and waited graciously while the emergencies kept coming. The one who, when she spotted an opportunity, immediately looked around to see who else she could bring along.
It was exhausting in a way that is hard to describe — not the tiredness of doing too much, but the specific depletion of someone who has been pouring from a cup that no one ever thought to refill.
I had spent a lifetime giving my empathy to everyone except the person who needed it most. Myself.
I am not that person anymore. Not because I stopped caring about others, but because I finally started caring about myself with the same intensity. Me first. Me second. Me third. Then, from that place of fullness, whatever I choose to offer outward is a genuine gift rather than an obligation quietly bleeding me dry.
This is not selfishness. This is what it looks like when someone who spent too long at the bottom of their own priority list finally moves up.
IV. THE BEST TEACHER I KNOW
Be Like a Baby
I want to tell you about the most enlightened beings I have ever observed.
Babies.
Think about what happens when you feed a baby something they don’t want. There is no internal debate. No weighing on social consequences. No quiet suffering through it to be polite. No “maybe I’ll grow to like it.” The face tells you everything immediately, and then — without ceremony, without guilt, without a second thought — out it comes.
They do not apologize. They do not explain. They simply refuse what does not work for them, completely and without hesitation.
“A baby does not tolerate what it does not want. It has not yet learned to pretend.”
I used to accompany friends on full-day shopping trips. Hours in stores. Waiting outside changing rooms. Carrying bags. Fetching different sizes. Giving feedback on outfits I hadn’t asked to see. Screaming quietly inside the entire time.
And then the one day I suggested we do something I actually enjoyed — something that mattered to me — they looked at me with the uncomplicated certainty of someone who had never been trained out of their preferences and said: no. I don’t want to do that.
No guilt. No elaborate explanation. Just a clean, honest no.
And I realized: they were right. Not in their double standard — that was real and it stung. But in the clarity of their refusal. They had something I had spent years giving away: the ability to simply not want something and act accordingly.
I lost friendships when I started living this way. I will not pretend otherwise. Some people in my life had been unconsciously relying on my endless tolerance, and when that tolerance ended, so did their interest. That told me everything I needed to know about what those friendships had actually been.
Be like a baby. Know what you want. Know what you don’t. Spit out what doesn’t nourish you — without drama, without apology, without a lengthy justification. You were born knowing how to do this. The world just spent years teaching you to forget.
V. YOUR TURN
How to Write Your Own Life Rules
Your rules will not look like mine. They shouldn’t. They need to come from your specific life — the patterns you keep repeating, the places you keep losing yourself, the moments you look back on and think: I knew better and I did it anyway.
Here is where to start:
Ask yourself honestly: where do I keep stumbling? Where do other people consistently drain my energy or steal my peace? Where do I say yes when every part of me means no?
Write from love, not punishment. These rules are not a verdict on your past. They are a commitment to your future. Write them as the wisest, most self-respecting version of yourself would write them.
Make them non-negotiable. Not rigid — you are allowed to grow and revise. But within the rule, there is no bargaining, no exceptions made out of guilt or pressure. The rule is the rule.
Write them down. Keep them somewhere you can return to them. Read them in the morning. Read them when you feel the old patterns pulling. The repetition is the practice — it is how new ways of being become instinct.
And when you slip — because you will, because we all do — do not treat it as failure. Treat it the way you would treat a child learning to walk. You wobble. You fall. You notice what happened. You get back up. You try again. You do not perform a trial. You simply return to the path.
THE POINT OF ALL OF THIS
Rules that come from love feel like freedom.
The rules I grew up resenting were someone else’s rules, serving someone else’s purposes, asking me to make myself smaller for someone else’s comfort.
These rules are different. Every single one of them exists to protect something: my peace, my energy, my time, my dignity, my capacity to show up fully for the life I am actively building.
They are not walls. They are foundations.
I am sharing them because I hope they give you permission — or at least a nudge — to write your own. You do not need anyone’s approval to decide how you want to live. You do not need to justify your standards to the people who benefited from your lack of them.
Write your rules. Keep them close. Let them remind you, on the days when the old patterns feel louder than the new ones, exactly who you have decided to become.
“You already know what you will and will not accept. Write it down. Make it real. Live it.”
With love and zero apology, from someone who is still learning — and finally okay with that.
Salima
