http://www.tulsaworld.com/blogs/post.aspx?Which_was_worse_July_2011_or_July_2012/48-16293
Frankly to me, if you are asking about any point in 2011 versus 2012, 2012 is automatically better. Last year sucked balls for me. It was nothing but turmoil and uphill battles. Nothing was easy and nothing was straightforward. It was like slogging through a waist-high pile of bullshit while wearing 10 lb Frankenstein shoes. 2012 is different. I made the real estate change at the beginning of the year and I am glad I did. Things in my job have gotten better. I had the 6 weeks in Hell experience last summer where I was lured to a company with a bunch of false promises. I started at my current job and, although I’ve had some times of self-doubt, performance anxiety, and frustration, things have leveled off and I finally feel like I know what I am doing. Not that I have all the answers by any means—more just a sense of “OK, I can actually do this.” And that’s an awesome feeling. My old boss took a new job recently and she is doing so well. She’s learning new things and it is wonderful to see people growing and rising to meet new challenges. To me that is one of the keystones of self-actualizing as an adult: you set goals for yourself on a regular basis and you work hard to fulfill them. Sure, you’ll fail sometimes but learning from those mistakes is also part of your journey. When I went to the weird music festival last weekend, it was something out of the ordinary but turned out to be a lot of fun. You have to be willing to take some risks and gambles here and there. I have something similar going on in a few days. I hate to admit it, but I actually have some butterflies in my stomach. (Insert Bieber here: “Now them butterflies in my stomach won’t stop, stop.”) It’s way too early to know anything even remotely definitive, but . . . so far, so good. If it turns out to be a bad experience, I can walk away not worrying that I left any possibilities on the table.
2012 has been a Number 9 year for me (if you follow such things) and it has certainly seemed to be so. This is the year of dissolution. “No more building up; it is time to dissolve,” as Tears for Fears said. This is the year of figuring out what you want to keep doing, to take with you, to continue, and what you want to let go of. A time to end one cycle of life and lay the foundation for the next one. I went to a training back in June (where I rode the giant mule, LOL) one of the things the director told me was that if I would open myself up to the world more, I would discover there aren’t as many assholes as I had previously suspected. Naturally, I was skeptical about this but I’ll be damned if it hasn’t been true. I’ve never had much trouble striking up conversations or interacting with new people. But I think there were things going on in my life at certain times that were an impediment to me being able to form new relationships and to bolster/nurture the ones I already had. When I went to hear my friend’s band last Saturday afternoon, I hardly knew anyone there and I was in a venue full of strange people. No one looked at me like an outcast or treated me like crap. I had lunch before the show and had a perfectly pleasant conversation with the hostess at the restaurant. When my friend and I went to The Watch, there were a couple of guys who sat down next to us that made totally enjoyable small talk before the movie started. I’ve missed that. On the plane ride from Atlanta to Charleston when I sat next to Gay Bradley Cooper, he was perfectly pleasant. I think someone can have the strongest people magnet in the world but if you put yourself in a scenario with a dark cloud hanging over it, no magnet can overcome the repellant. Some people are happier that way and they have every right to be. You see them everywhere. When the waiter or the check-out girl says, “How are you?” They say, “Fine” and look at the floor like they want no further interaction. They never say, “Fine. How are you?” Because that would be just too much of a stretch. Well that ain’t me. Most everyone has a story and some of them are downright fascinating. Some people are shitheads, yeah, and there’s no hope for them. I talked to a guy a couple of weeks ago who bit my head off because he was expecting a call from Best Buy about his refrigerator. When it turned out to be me and not them, he was a jackass. Oh well. His problem, not mine. If you deliberately choose to color the world as a dark, terrible place, that is what you will always find. If you get some perverse joy out of misery and complaints, you make it 10x harder to ever break out of that cycle. I couldn’t be around that anymore. The thought of it was so anathema to me that it made me physically sick. I’m like any Sagittarian out there: if I get fenced in (in a pasture I don’t like, that is), my first impulse is to run. If you put up a low fence in a pasture full of honeysuckle and tall grass, well hey, I’m OK with that. But being tethered to this, like, perpetual dark cloud of angst and misery and turmoil and drama and martyrdom = no thanks. I’m not going to make any apologies for being happy, damnit. God knows 2011 was a f*ckwad year. I deserve a respite from that.
