I choose to make this Monday a fresh start I am looking at myself, looking at the life I have created, the life I am living, and the life I have yet to live. This reflection allows me the space to realize who I am, who I have been, and who I am creating of myself every day.
There is a great deal in my life that I am thankful for. There is a great deal in my life for which I need to atone. I am facing both situations with regularity. Not a day passes where I am both loved deeply and told, with great emotion, about the problems I have wrought in life. It is hard to hear about yourself with such negativity and such intensity almost every single day. Yet to know that the people who love you most feel free to say these things without retribution is also a good feeling.
I am not a perfect person, or it seems, even a particularly good to other people. I am brash, curt, overly apologetic, overly sensitive, arrogant, and blind to most of the nuance happening around me. From an outside perspective I, more or less, suck at being good to people or even paying attention to people who aren’t directly presenting an obstacle to my daily life. I, by habit or nature, let assholes rent space in my head. This is a problem I’ve battled my entire life with little success short of a few brief years of ignoring the biggest assholes for the lesser forms of assholery or drifting in and out of obsessions as a replacement for the aforementioned behavioral patterns.
This assessment helps me to understand who I am trying to be in this space and time. I intend for that person to be a better version of myself. That means more stable. More dedicated to the people around me. More capable of brushing off the nonsense and noise, see the criticism as growth and not a thousand paper cuts, and able to breathe in life every day with joy .