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Jumper - Third Eye Blind |
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It's been a year since I made this post. Well, 2 days short of a year. But the piercings I got on January 3rd last year were meant to stick with me, and remind me of some things.
It's hard to look at the list that I made for myself and say that I've improved as a whole. A lot of things happened over 2011 that drastically changed my life though, and for better or worse, I did change.
Stop being a jerk.
Stop being jealous.
Stop being lazy.
Stop being rude.
Stop being judgmental.
Stop crying all the time.
In short:
BE A BETTER FRIEND, YOU DUMBASS.
When I wrote these things, I was very self conscious of how I was treating the people around me. I was hurting both of my best friends at the time, and going through some mental shit that I didn't like to talk about much, but needless to say a lot of it was stress, and a lot of it was probably also unhealthily simplifying issues that needed to be talked out, instead of just pointing at myself as a terrible person. That isn't how a person can grow.
I've always been a jerk to some extent, in that I can be selfish and often snap back at people when I'm moody. It's funny because I also worry about others, and want to treat them well, so when I told people I was a jerk, they'd say 'no you're not!', without realizing why I would say it. I think though that I've learned a little bit how to catch myself when I am in a bad mood, even though this has been through a whole lot of trial and error, and hold back what I want to say because I may not mean it later. When I say trial and error, I really do mean that. There were arguments in the past year that I could have handled better, but as of right now I at least feel like I am more aware of it.
Jealousy is a nasty thing, and I don't think that anyone ever truly gets rid of it. I especially used to get jealous of the silliest things, like someone hanging out with someone else, or that someone is RPing with other people instead of me. I took a lot of this out on ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) insidious, which is pretty hypocritical of me because she's always told me how much she values our RPs. I feel now like at least when I feel jealousy rearing its ugly head, I can acknowledge it for what it is, and tell myself that it will pass.
My laziness has hardly improved, lol. Maybe it has a little bit, though. My house is still a mess, but much less than it used to be. I clean the kitchen roughly every week, sometimes a few TIMES a week, sometimes less. I'm trying not to count the holidays, because that's not fair. It's hard to keep motivation to do anything going when you're unemployed, and I also have always had trouble focusing. But I'm trying to beat this even still, and in the month of December I felt like I had a little progress. Better late than never, right? I'm setting smaller goals for myself, trying to keep up with taking my vitamins, and that's giving me more energy to get things done. I got almost all of my christmas cards out, but not every last one. For that, I apologize. The rest are coming soon. I am better at keeping up with the hobbies I commit to, though, and I just want to prove to myself that I can keep up at this pace.
I don't think I managed to stop being rude. I seem to do this unintentionally, and am still working on figuring out how to catch myself before I do it. Part of it is my attention span and the fact that I still don't give people 100% of my focus when talking to them. That's probably the key there, at least. That and thinking about how what I say may sound before I say it. Inevitably, I still sometimes don't realize something is until it's out of my mouth, though. -_-
I have been told that I'm very judgmental. It's a very frustrating thing because I know how opinionated I am, but I also want to understand my friends. In fact, I try so hard to resolve things, that it crosses that threshold into asking too much, saying too much, and making people feel like I'm pointing out flaws in what they are thinking. It's taken me all year to figure this out, and I don't believe that it's going to be fixed overnight, but I also feel like without insidious's help, I wouldn't have come to realize that it's the way I talk, rather than the intent behind it, that's putting people on edge. Despite not fixing this in the year since my resolution, I do feel like I have learned from it.
I want to say that I cry less. I'm not sure if this is something you could consider true or not unless you saw the evolution of my emotional state over the past few years. When I was in my early 20's, I cried at everything. I eventually steeled myself to a lot of things, but also think that I tried pretty hard to just be apathetic about things that used to make me upset. When I realized that that too was not solving things, not to mention that I also think that I had a few months where I just was plain unstable thanks to work, friendships, and other things, I became a bigger crybaby than I used to be, plus adopting an anger problem. A bad one. But even if I can only say that I came back to the amount of crying that I used to do, it's better than where I was. Now when I am that upset, it's a little bit easier to rationalize my feelings with myself, and calm myself down. It's still difficult, though, but I feel stronger.
Am I a better friend? That depends on who you ask. That's not something I feel like I can judge for myself. I just know that 2011 really sucked. I lost my dog, my job twice, and my best friend. I don't want to experience any of that again, but without it, I also wouldn't be the person I am today. I've still got a long way to grow. I've also grown a lot. I just want to make the best from here on out.
So as far as new years resolutions go, I guess I just want to be the best person that I can be to all of the people around me. I want to live up to their expectations of me, but realistically. I won't judge myself harshly if I fall short, I'll just dust myself off and try again. It's something that it took a lot of hardship to learn, and I don't want that to go to waste.
And besides, I have to ask myself sometimes, after getting all the way through Trails in the Sky... What would Estelle do?
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