This seems to be the repeating, never-ending cycle in my life. Two steps backward, one step forward, keep trying and keep moving because that's better than just being stagnant and static. And sometimes it is so frustrating. I can't tell you the number of times I have said to myself, "Are you kidding me? I made the same mistake again? I really messed that all up. For the 1,348th time." And then I'll have a tiny bit of progress, and then make another horrific mistake and get upset all over again.
Life doesn't have an instruction book. Sure, there is the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, thousands of self-help books, motivational speakers, spiritual guides, the "Worst Case Scenario" series... But until I find something that actually says, "Katie, when faced with (x), do (y), and do it every time," I'm going to go ahead and say that we are all here figuring all this stuff out on our own. Especially if we follow the American social norm of not asking for help, stuffing our problems, not expressing appropriate and healthy anger, denying our need for any sort of counselors or therapists in the course of our 80+ years (why it's socially acceptable to go to the doctor for every little thing but not to a therapist for the big and the small, I will never know), not fostering a sense of community, creating and existing in dysfunctional families and other relationships... It's no wonder a lot of us feel lost and confused much of the time. I certainly do.
At a previous job, we were having a staff meeting one afternoon. One of my coworkers, an honest and straight-forward gentleman, said, "I just want to know if all of this chaos is normal. We don't know what we are doing day to day with all these changes. Is all this madness okay? Or should we know what we are doing at this point?" And that resonated; what he'd said described my life perfectly.
Here's a secret that I'm going to put out there: I don't know what I'm doing about 99% of the time. I will attribute about 1% of the good I've done in my life to actually knowing something and learning from experience. The other 99% is all by the grace of God, or luck, or coincidence, or whatever you believe that exists outside of human choice and will. It has not been me, because I have no idea what I'm doing in this life.
When I do gather up my courage and try to do something out of the norm, try to get help for something or make a change in my life, I have no idea if it will succeed or not. I love this great quote that has been attributed to Thomas Edison: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." It seems that in my life, and especially in the last 3 years, I've tried dozens, hundreds, thousands of potential solutions to problems. There is this pattern of exploring every option before finding the right one, the magic perfect solution that actually works or makes any sort of progress. And this latest trial is no exception.
I have just finished up a 3-year experiment that has failed. And if you know me, you know how much I dislike failure. It's not so much that I can't fail or that I'm above making mistakes. It's more that when I believe (in) something, when I put my whole life into something and it turns out to not work out the way I want, I question my own intuition. I question my ability to "read" situations, to read people and the real story that usually happens behind the curtains. When I believe something to be true or believe in something, whether it is based on intelligence or faith, I trust my own gut as well. And when it turns out differently than what I expect, it throws me for a loop. I start to distrust myself, my gut, when so many times it has guided me in the right direction. A lot of times I attribute my gut feeling to prayer: I talk with God, I wait for an answer, and I act. And recently, what I thought I heard, the conversation I thought I had with a Higher Power, seems to have gotten lost in translation somewhere along the way.
I thought I could fix some problems in my life on my own. I thought with the tools I had, with what I had learned and with my life experience and with just believing in something enough, I could overcome an enormous challenge in my life. And maybe in the future I can. But what I learned recently, what I learned this week, was that for now, I can't. For now, all I need to do is say, "I need help."
It is so hard for me to ask for help. I've discovered that this is a common problem with many of us; but why? Why do we feel like we can do everything, solve everything, on our own? It is okay to ask for help, and I would even say that it's incredibly foolish to not ask for help from time to time. There is so much knowledge out there, from people's life experience, from science, from the history of the world... It is okay to say, "I don't know what to do. I'm going to ask someone who may know more than I do about this."
There is something so freeing about that, too... about looking at a situation, and realizing that for now, not necessarily forever, it is bigger than I am. With the tools I have and what I have learned, I may still need some extra assistance. And that even though it seems like an incredible failure, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a victory, for now. And then down the road in the future, I can try again. Or try a different path altogether.
Many people think that in the Bible, Peter failed when he tried to follow Jesus out on the water and started sinking. But Peter was the only one who even attempted to follow Jesus out onto the water. The other disciples stayed inside the boat, not even testing their faith or Jesus' power. But Peter wanted to try.
I think of these past 3 years as me trying something that I wanted to try. I really wanted it to work, I thought that it would work, and for now it didn't. But I tried. Maybe that's victory enough for now.
