So over the past 18 months I've learned that Things Go Wrong.
You will love someone and think it's going great and get dumped without understanding why. You will set a goal and not be able to meet it because you got food poisoning. You will crash your car. Your dog will get hurt when you're not there to comfort her, and then she'll lose her leg. Your grandfather will die. The job you love will stop being a job you love and start being a job you have to leave. The job you really really really want will turn out not to be available after all, after you've gone out on a limb to get it. Your healthy body will stop working right. You won't have any money. You will get a flat tire. The boy you like will stop calling you. You'll get depressed. Your roof will leak. Your hot water heater will break. An organization that used to inspire you will get poisoned by internal politics and toxic personalities. You will feel out of sync with your friends, who are getting married and having babies and getting promoted and winning awards and otherwise flourishing. Your neighbors will resent you because of your overgrown hedges. Your car will have a warning light on the dashboard that you can't ignore.
It's going to happen, all of that and worse. You're going to be disappointed. Might as well plan for it.
That means you need reserves. You need savings, you need health insurance, you need the goodwill of friends and family and acquaintances and strangers, you need extra time. You need optimism and self-forgiveness. When the time comes, you're going to need to fall back on all of this. I was short on most of these things except, miraculously, the goodwill of other people and my own optimism. I have more capacity for self-forgiveness than at any other time period in my life, and boy is that nice, but I'm still a little bit stingy with it. Savings, mmmm, not so much anymore. Gotta rebuild those, though I'm not sure how. Decent health insurance is in the works.
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