Wow. Mistakes.

Funny how someone so good at collecting and cataloging little snippets of wisdom can be so bad at actually understanding them. All year I have been on a search for perspective. I knew I’d lost it. Now, for a while at least, I have it back. I feel so liberated, so liberated from myself and so grateful to so many people…

But now I have to say a thing or two about a good friend named Mike because I have basically ignored him for so long. I completely admire Mike — he’s always been thoughtful, intelligent, industrious, interesting — all of the things that people aspire to be. Then, a few years ago he was in a bad accident that left him paralyzed… And in spite of everything, Mike became more thoughtful, more intelligent, more industrious, and more interesting. I haven’t really been a friend to Mike like I should have been — for years I haven’t really called, haven’t really visited, haven’t really told anyone about him. But he has always kept in touch with me, brought things that might interest me to my attention, told people about me…

So why was I so awful to Mike? I never realized until last night that I had been. I just haven’t wanted to see him much because he was such a good friend to me — and I valued that, and because I valued that, I didn’t want to jeopardize it by actually spending any time with him and risking a falling out, since things already seemed okay to me as they were… It sounds like the stupidest possible bit of thinking ever, but that’s just it — I didn’t think about it until last night. I didn’t realize that in spite of all the friendship he’s shown me over the last few years, I never once really put my trust in him to remain the good friend that he so obviously is. And because of that, it’s a miracle he still is one — a lot of people wouldn’t be. What a guy. Thanks, Mike.

I have so many people to apologize to. I deserve to be taken out and kicked around. Have I bothered to trust anyone that I care about recently?! I don’t think so. I’ve been busy trusting only strangers because if a stranger broke my trust, I hadn’t really lost anything… and because of this, I’ve been trying to keep strangers from becoming friends — because somewhere inside, I knew that I was treating strangers better. I have been incredibly selfish and living purely defensively with the people that matter most, without realizing that that is how I’d become.

I actually told someone recently not to ever tell me they love me because it was too much for me to handle, that I would likely behave badly afterward so it was better just not to say it. I actually said that — I actually put all of the responsibility for my well-being on their shoulders. I have been so thoughtless, so heartless, so unfair.

I don’t know when got this lost…

I have so many things to think about. But I feel good. I feel incredibly good, like I’ve finally found the truth that I’ve been trying desperately to rediscover for a long time. I have my perspective. Yes, it is painful now to know what I’ve done… But the pain feels good because it is real, not imagined, and it is helping me.

I hope I’m not too late to make amends for some of this. And of course, the future is always open — mine has just been changed for the better.

Perspective. It’s a funny thing. You lose it and you don’t even know it’s gone and you’re suddenly making every mistake in the book. Then, from out of the blue, when you least expect it, it hits you on the head and everything is clear.

Tonight, I pissed someone off pretty bad, totally without meaning to. In fact, I thought I was being nice — helpful even. But what I did really made them very angry and in the midst of it all, they said I was being self-centered and defensive, protecting myself at the expense of respect for the free will and feelings of others.

And when I understood what they meant, everything was suddenly in perspective once again. You cannot “help” people into just the position you want them to be in, naturally. People are people and exist beyond my feelings about them or my feelings about what they do. What shocks me most is that I didn’t realize that lately I’ve been ignoring such wisdom completely.

So just like that, every single problem I have in the world right now was solved. Maybe things aren’t as good as they could have been had I never lost perspective in the first place, but certainly I have gone from unhappy and confused to perfectly content and perfectly clear — in under six hours!

I only hope my apologies reach their destinations, because I really and truly owe some people apologies!