stop beating myself up for small failures

that I’m completely failing at this…

I forget to work out… I beat myself up. I have a typo in my brief. I beat myself…. I let something hurt my feelings… oh I’m such a wimp.

I’ve been in a pretty bad mood ever since I received the impromptu and uninvited phone call from my former high school sweetheart Sam. There is something pretty darn frustrating about having someone not respect a simple request. There’s something very disrespectful about it, as well.

Then again he never did respect me worth a damn.

It also reminds me of how low my self esteem was back then: how much bullshit I tolerated, how much I thought I was unworthy of being liked and thought I needed to be agreeable to have friends.

Of course, this means that I got stomped on a lot. Of course, people are always trying to stomp on you for something: you got something they want, they are insecure and need you to feel bad to feel good, whatever. The list goes on. Then again there is the cliche: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

So there is a part of me that wants to travel back in time to my younger self and bitchslap her to reality. Then again, I did learn a lot about lying and whatnot which really helped me when I worked as an investigator. Even the shittiest parts of my past made me strong. . .and I learned how get along and so you’re back. . .

OH hemmm. okay.

The worst part of being stupid in your younger days is running into people from back then who still assume you’re as unwise as you were back then: like the man who sent me a picture of his erect penis less than a month from his wedding date. I got a text message from a number I didn’t recognize saying (and only saying) “I am so hard” Okay, he has since divorced this woman and is single but I have to say “who the fuck does that?!!!” Go pay a 900 number like everybody else. I got an email asking if he could text me later, which had been sent before the test but shame on him for not getting a response before sesnding the pr0n. OF course, I’m sure he appreciated me calling the number and saying “Hi I got a lurid text message from this number and I don’t know you. . . ” Yes I did call it. I used to subpoena people in crack houses complete with guns and pit bulls. You expect me to be scared of calling someone billions of miles away. OH hell no.

Ahem . . anyway.

That also explains the whole debacle that was Jennifer’s first wedding. I did consider her, Frank, Patti and Ken to be friends—not great friends but friends. When I arrived at the wedding and got dissed in different ways by all of them except the bride.

IN retrospect, Patti was keen on borrowing stuff without returning (or returning it when you confronted her about it months later). Ken loved to play jokes where making me look stupid in front of a group of people was the punchline. This might be charming a la George Clooney and Ashton Kulcher but it really was about making me look stupid and knowingly making me feel bad. It was obvious I was an insecure person and he knowingly did it, complete with the “sensitive” diatribe that is so common to emotional abusers AND he was ( and actually is) a person who can’t take half the shit he dishes out. Frank was always snide. Now I thought at the time that I was being sensitive and even had to ask other people if I was being sensitive but I’ve gotten past that. They were being jerks. I even confronted Ken who said “yeah were were immature . . .” yep.

So I expected people to treat me better in the future than they did when I was in college. Of course, considering that it was over 7 years since college; they should have treated me better because I, for all practical purposes, was a stranger now.

I feel like I never know what is going to happen when I see people from my past. If they are going to be assholes because they think they can. I would like to think that people have matured but every time I give someone that type of credit, I end up disappointed.

So this whole Sam thing had me feeling bad for a while. I realized that I haven’t really forgiven myself for my stupid choices . . . and then I did.

I went into a big ass depression during law school and yet I managed to graduate. Unfortunately, my GPA hit the toilet. Man I’m not feeling good about it.

I beat myself up for getting pissy with people after finding out my cat had a potentially fatal disease (FIV)