SILVER LININGS, LESSONS LEARNED

I am optimistic...  or maybe it's not so much that I'm optimistic, but I believe in the good in things. I'm really good at finding silver linings.  If you were around for my rantings over Crazy Grumpy Lady, you will remember how we clashed when my insistence on locating silver linings crashed up against her insistence that there aren't any.

Not saying either is better.  Just saying that she was annoying as hell. :)

But, I was thinking about that as I was searching for silver linings in my own chapter-closings. What I was thinking about was "Okay, that was an odd decade...  what was going on there? What was I supposed to learn from all of that?"

And I wasn't really sure.  When I thought about the most obvious things I'd learned about myself, they weren't really all that different from what I believed when I started -- aside from maybe a fresh realization I hadn't had before that I was pretty naive and apparently had "Easy to Manipulate" stamped across my forehead. Was that it? Not that this was the only thing.  There were honest accountings of bad choices, unhealthy motivations, pride swallowings, and uncomfortable admissions. There were people that I wished I had treated differently, people I wished I'd listened to more. Advice I should have taken, stubbornness I should have bested.

Maybe those are the lessons.

But I also thought, "Maybe the point isn't the mistakes you made or the lessons you were supposed to learn.  What do you regret doing?"

And really... nothing.

I didn't regret trusting. I didn't regret caring. I didn't regret trying. I didn't regret supporting. I didn't regret pouring in.

and while there were specifics in the middle that I could have done a whole lot differently, who I was... she wasn't someone I regretted being.

Just maybe next time, I can listen to myself and trust myself a little bit more.