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Dear Mel & Ma,

I recently had a massive fight with my parents. I’ve never had so many mean things said to me in my life and I’ve never said so many mean things in my life. The scrap made me re-evaluate who I am as a person and it seems to me that I’m probably the worst kind. I broke up with my boyfriend because I realised how much I hold him back, limit his possibilities and influence sadness and arguments. I am crazy in love with him but there’s no way that I can continue to hurt him and be okay with that at all, even if the hurt sprouts from jokes. I’m an anchor to all of the people I am supposed to love, and I’m going to have to let them go. What do I do?

Hurting on the Inside.

Dear Hurting on the Inside,

We’ve all had fights with our parents and it just seems to me as though you’ve had a rough day and they’re feelings caught up with you when you least expected them. You are definitely not the worst kind of person for speaking what and how you feel to the people who deserve and need to hear it. There is nothing better than honesty, even if it does cause a small amount of temporary pain. Your boyfriend, however, is a completely different matter. If you love him and you’re hurting yourself by ending something that makes you happy, you need to fix that. You might be an anchor in a dangerous sense, but everyone knows that anchors keep ships safe; you’re letting yours go. Your boyfriend, I sense, seems to adore you, puts you on an unreachable pedestal and couldn’t let you go if his life depended on it. To me, you have the answers right in front of you. It’s a bad day, not a bad life and if you’re in the gutter now, at least tonight, you’ll be looking up at the stars, knowing that up is the only direction in which to move. Don’t let anyone go. You are your own saviour! Good luck!

All our love, Mel and Ma xx