One Week Ago…
If you scroll down here, you’ll notice that it was seven days ago that I posted how great I felt about giving up beer.
I’ve had a number of failures in my lifetime. Some of them have been fairly big failures and some of them took me months, and even years, to move past.
One of the hardest parts of accepting that you’ve been a miserable failure in some areas is being able to not sit at home and weep because you haven’t succeeded. I find it incredibly easy to sit at home in a heap of self-loathing without giving anything other than my sad little self a single thought. I can do this for weeks.
In fact, I’ve got it down so well that even the dog knows when I feel like this: When I do, she can typically sleep with the entirety of her body ON TOP OF MY PERSON and I don’t notice.
I’m beginning to think that perhaps even being a failure takes learning and practice, because this time, I’m doing my best to not engage in these self-loathing behaviours. Sure, I may have eaten half a bag of Chee-Tos and an entire tray of Oreos for dinner. With a can of diet pop. Because that totally makes sense.
But I ate my Chee-Tos and Oreos WITHOUT feeling miserable.
I’m growing as a person, I suppose, because without failures I would never really know what success feels like. The successes I’ve had in school, in educating myself, in starting a new job, in my barn and with my horse: These are all little tastes of a very, very big something I hope to have one day.
If giving up beer, if being petrified of a relationship that goes beyond the third date, if my whole history of running from anything that gets too tough weren’t a part of me, perhaps the successes I do get to taste now and then wouldn’t be nearly so sweet.
And I really don’t want the things I love most to lose any of their sweetness in my world.
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