Tough Lessons

The has been a year of tough lessons. Especially in the past few weeks, I've started to grapple with a host of truisms that everyone else seems to intrinsically know. For some reason, The Master Programmer failed to plug in these codes when I was created at The Factory, so when confronted with certain situations, my brain sends back an error 404: knowledge not found. Chances are, you already know all of these things, but for some reason it's taken me the better part of 30 years for them to dawn on me. They're things like:

• You can't trust everybody
• People rarely (or never) change
• Not everyone is going to like you - no matter how smart, pretty, successful and nice you are
• Not everything is going to go your way -and, in fact, there will be times when nothing goes your way
• Some people are just assholes
• You can't do everything and be everything to everyone at all times
• It is rare or impossible to be friends with ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands
• No one is perfect

Now, I know what you're thinking. Holy shit, is she naiive. Did she just fall off the Idealism Truck? The sad part is, I've always considered myself a realist. Expect the best but prepare for the worst, and all that.

I now see that I'm not so realistic after all.

Having high expectations for yourself usually means you also have high expectations for the world around you and everyone in it. But the truth is not everyone meets those expectations - not even ourselves. Take this example: I expected that I could be friends with my ex-husband, because things were going nicely and I'm technically a "good person." I've never been friends with any ex-anythings, but I thought, I'm a grown-up now, I should be able to do this. Right? Wrong. I wasn't prepared for the utter Backlash of Bitter I experienced when I realized how virtually perfect Wubsy's life is going. I should have expected this, because I experienced it not so long ago when he came to me for training advice. But for some reason, I put on my Can-Do Boots and just kept trudging along.

Some times I feel like I missed a part of my life. Where was that chunk in my teens or early 20's (that everyone else seemed to have gotten) where I was supposed to learn how to be less trusting and more realistic? Most adults do not go back repeatedly for a beating once they've received one, but I'm apparently I'm:

1. a masochist
2. not an adult
3. not most adults

Or maybe I'm missing a crucial part of my brain, like I mentioned earlier - flawed programming. I'm missing the code that tells me all these important Things I Ought to Know. Now that I'm "supposed to be" an adult, I'm getting bombarded by these ridiculous "lessons."

System Overload.

For someone who's so outspoken and sarcastic, I should be a lot more on top of these things.

The -itis is still in my chest, so I can't train. As Tea reminded me, I need to be better about not breaking the cardinal rule of not training when it's in my chest. Oh, here's another one of those lessons:

• I'm human and the rules apply to me, too

Fancy that.