I Must Try to Remember

Yesterday was a rough day.  In the morning, I received notice that I hadn't gotten a job I was fairly sure I had a good chance of getting.  Then, when I attempted to go to my back up plan for the upcoming school year, I found out I had managed to screw that chance up as well.

Everything external to myself seemed to be trying to indicate that I should give up my dream.

I was awash in self-pity.  Worse than that, I hated myself for being awash in self-pity.  I can't stand when people wrap themselves up in their own little universes of self-pity and fail to understand why they suddenly feel like the whole world is against them.

But at 44 years old, I have learned a thing or two about how to deal with adversity.  I am a person who seems to be predisposed toward putting myself into situations where failure is always an option, and sometimes it seems this is the option I'm most likely to take.

The first and best thing I do is to give myself permission to be sad.  It seems sometimes that we forget it is okay to be sad.  There is a big difference between sadness and self-pity.  Sadness is "things are not good, and that makes me feel bad."  Self-pity is "things are not good, why do bad things always happen to me, I don't deserve this, I'm a good person most of the time, nothing good ever happens to me, everyone else is happy except me, etc., etc."

The key difference here is sadness is much more finite.  I am sad, I have a reason to be sad.  Now what?

And the correct answer to that, for me, has always been, "I have to get over this sometime, why not start now?"  This is my mantra to replace the litany of self-pity.  The next is, "What do I do now?"

This morning, I revisited plan B.  I went to the place that told me I had no chance, and asked for one more.  I was not told yes.  But the hard no became a soft no, contingent on someone else's decision.  It may not happen, but I prefer "may not" to "definitely not."

And then I began formulating plan C.

So at what point do I give up the dream?  I've got the rest of the alphabet, and then I guess I can go to the Greek alphabet.

I may sound optimistic, but that's not really the case.  My optimism has always been of the post-Modern variety.  I don't believe in absolutes, and my particular brand of hope carries within it the possibility of failure.  What I do believe in is the importance of individual perception (again, post-Modern in nature).

Many people who look at me and where I am now would see me as a failure.  Sometimes that voice of self-pity comes through and I see myself that way as well.  But this perception of failure is, like most things, temporary.  There will be a change.  And if I don't feel I'm a failure, the perceptions of others shade toward irrelevancy.

At some point in my life, I will regard myself as being successful again.  There will be some event, some accomplishment, some recognition that I have succeeded.  It is an unfortunate aspect of my personality that I will probably not expend a fraction of the emotional energy I have put into being sad at this moment into being happy in that moment, but I must try to remember.