Out of the Desert

“A person who has only known the desert has no good reason to miss the trees” ~Me, just now

     I say that to say that you never know what you DIDN’T have before until you actually have it.

A recent VERY candid conversation with a tiny friend of mine under one of  her FB posts led to my discussion of how I handled the end of my last two prior relationships.  I don’t understand stress eating, except I do.  With me, I'd stress drink, and anyone who has been inebriated before understands “intoxicated bored eating.”  Throw in a bit of depression and work-related stress and you don’t leave the house except for work and supplies.  In my comment, I explained how I had gone down through this to the point where it caused me an illness that I have since shaken, and I have since lost all of the weight I gained to boot.  Lifestyle changes and such, I hope y'all are reading about some of it on Tuesdays.

I credited my current lady with helping me back from it, and my tiny friend asked me what I'd learned from those previous and how they applied to current productivity in my current.

     And that is where we are today.

One thing that stuck out in my response was at the top of this post.  “You tend to not know what you didn’t have until you actually have it sometimes.  Support, honesty and someone who is after your common goal and not just their own are among those things.  Once you see them in your face, you work to nurture them.  Except it doesn’t feel like work.”

     Stewing over the past is something I do.  I look at what I should have seen, think of what I should have said and stress over what I should have done.  Luckily, I am blessed with a good eye for detail and a large part of hindsight being 20/20 is that one can see more of the other side of a situation than they ever could on the first pass through.  By that, I mean that the normal human “thing” in the moment as it is happening is listening to respond and not to understand.  Revisiting something in memory offers a different perspective, even if that perspective is “shit, I should have seen that!”
That’s both a blessing and a lesson if you allow it to be.  Take that with you, KEEP that with you.  Fine tune it for what you will find yourself up against later on down the road.  Be better, make NEW mistakes, don’t go repeating the old ones.

     But get out of that damned desert.
Recognize familiar situations you aren’t cool with and fix them, even if “fixing” means running the fuck up out of them.  Recognize the situations you wish you had seen to nurture earlier on and DO that shit.

I guess one could say she is making me better.