The Good: I can’t express how much of an impact it has when I feel appreciated. I don’t mean parades or carnival or the like every time I do something right, but just that fact that I can tell there is absolutely no pretense or judgement from my friend Bill whenever I do something makes all the difference in the world. Immediately it reinforces that I do have some value and that my actions are more than random events, but they have an impact on both myself and the people around me. I have seen how it can be a lot easier to criticize someone for what they did not accomplish or did not complete to certain expectations or standards first hand, and I know how much it wore me down to not wanting to do anything at all because there was no opportunity for me to get any sort of positive outcomes even from the most successful performances. Just the opposite has happened in the case of where I am now. Not only am I feeling like there are things I do well and are appreciated, I continue to want to do them more often and with better outcomes than the last time, not only for the reinforcement that I gain externally, but I am also beginning to see the internal reward for these things, and no longer worrying about fighting off the criticisms of incomplete or less than par, or whatever you want to call it. Even when I make mistakes, or something goes wrong, I look at it now as an opportunity to learn, rather than subject to avoid. I am becoming more assertive and bringing topics to the conversation that are relevant and enriching to me, and while some of them may seem remedial or fundamental or elementary to an outsider, the encouragement I get for WANTING to improve is an incredible reward.
The Bad: While I was able to accomplish a number of necessary tasks in town today, there are still some lingering priority matters that are becoming increasingly frustrating. I feel like I was led on a bit of a wild goose chase tonight to resolve some of this, and don’t really have anything to show for it other than added aggravation and worry that some of this may never really be resolved. For as much has been accomplished and set for the, there are a few key elements that are becoming increasingly hard to deal with, and the ones that fare still at this point open-ended are of significance. Tis makes them burn with ever-increasing brightness at the front of my mind, and keep me distracted form a lot of other things that I am needing to put effort into, and now those too are starting to spark an urgency that can quickly lead to the panic of fires or worse yet, the cold embers of damage control. Unfortunately i am not the only one with control in these matters, and while I have done my best to be cordial, fair, and even accommodating, it should come as no surprise, but is infuriating that this is not reciprocated.
The Really Really Ugly: I think that we all have a couple of things that we struggle with, for whatever reason, and these things repeatedly do significant damage to our cores or our characters. Some of us as we become better adults, learn means of compensation or ordeal themselves to take these things head on, to varying degrees of success. One of these that I am constantly hurting myself and others with is my floundering or even outright avoidance of communication when there is difficulty, or in how I present that difficulty to others. Tonight this hurt one of the people who has so instrumental in my continuing to have all of my wordily possessions, a place to lay my head at night, and who has shown me such amazing love over the past few weeks, that it hurt them I think even more than doubly that I did not communicate as well as I should have. I had borrowed Bill’s car to go in to the city to get some things accomplished, and when things began to get difficult for me, my attention to respecting his stake in the situation was ignored. It is something I have done to a number of people on different occasions, and for different reasons. The situations leading totem are usually different, but my actions and the overall outcome caries a cloud that becomes increasingly hurtful to others, painful to me, and really a very accurate portrayal of me that I want to be the opposite of. In tonight’s case, there were some things that I got a bit misled in trying to accomplish, and yes my phone did lose power. But there is a bigger picture bottom line that I had his car, and I had left in the morning with a plan for half a day in which my return journey ended at midnight. I don’t remember what time our last contact was, but that it had been hours was inconsiderate, selfish, and just plain wrong. I know all of this and what bothers me most I think, is that I continue to do the same exact thing when I get over involved in something, or when I start to fear even the smaller t repercussions, I go completely over the deep end and turn what is probably a small matter of unanticipated consideration into a catastrophic calamity that has no chance of generating any sort of positive outcomes. I know that I don’t want to continue to do this, yet I do anyway. I know it’s consequences, yet can’t seem to stop myself from reverting to these behaviors that I know I want to avoid, and so once I start them, they become the beginning of even deeper and more sinister behaviors that are in avoidance of the consequences for the first ones. Even right now, I am hiding in my bedroom, and know Bill is out there, angry and hurt, and I am avoiding him, partially in the hopes he will cool off, but also in the hopes that I can simply avoid addressing this when the time comes. I can justify my avoidance with completely logical or even well intentioned rhetoric at times, but the fact remains: I am masking a much bigger issue that I don’t know how to address, and don’t know that I have the ability to overcome, not because I am incapable, but because the problem itself is cyclically symptomized by my avoiding it until something else becomes more pressing or distracting and I can avoid facing it at all.
Journal 