I finished orientation yesterday. Jim’s out sick, so I’ll probably have a couple days now where I can fly under the radar. If he would just stop SNARKING at me, I feel like I could handle all this. I get it, I get it, life’s trying to toughen me up. But — hang in there! Stay upbeat, and you can take anything! …heh. Me, upbeat. LOL. eugh, if I were just a bit more optimistic, I could be the happiest person on earth. I mean, what is this? These other people with their scraps of skill and talent go swaggering around all self-assured and confident, and I’M sitting around doubting my abilities, my gifts?? Dear Lord, when you gave me everything, why didn’t you keep half and leave me a little self-confidence and contentment?!!

It’s cool! It’s cool! it’s going to be okay. Because, I have to say, Will, you were right. Already, getting out and being around people, seeing what they do and how they live, I’m feeling a lot better about myself. It’s so true — the way people are, we’re always comparing ourselves with everything, so whether you feel good or bad depends on what you surround yourself with, and that’s where isolation gets really dangerous. Because your imagination automatically starts filling in the details, especially if Facebook is feeding you these ideas about how everyone else is doing, and you build up this whole image of humanity where you’re at the very bottom, and everyone else looks like they’re way more amazing and they’re doing way better. And that’s totally natural. We all spend a lot of time feeling like we’re missing something, and it’s easy to feel like someone else has exactly what we don’t, and then we project onto them all the things we actually do have, plus this idealized sense of contentment. So we end up with this perfect, happy person who’s a total figment of our imagination :-/

On the other hand, though, if you try to work with your weakness and your inertia and just keep trying to move forward, you’ll find a lot of the time that you can get farther tacking back and forth than other people can sailing straight into the wind — and…that’s a really validating feeling, when you catch up with someone or even pull ahead.