Your Own Medicine is Hard to Swallow

The title has a double meaning.

First off, I had to swallow a spoonful of my own "the right thing to do is most often the hardest thing to do" today.  I'm still fighting to keep that medicine down and I don't know if I can keep it down.

So I was feeling REALLY shitty, then out of the a blue an old friend shows up in chat and we start talking.  I hadn't talked to her in over a year and we got to talking about her career and how she was unhappy in it, severely overworked and severely underpaid.  This is how the convo went (edit for brevity and clarity):



me: awwww... you seem so down when I talk to you now
you used to be so much more cheery
what happened to that girl?

her: i realized that my optimism was just a front for resisting failure
so now i'm afraid of failure and very aware that i am idle because of it

me: what? are you living life you like you've failed?

her: pretty much

me: just adjust your outlook, your expectations of self. I went through the exact same thing you're going through 9-10 years ago.
Life rarely goes according to plan. change plans

her: :|

me: easier said than done I know
you just gotta drop your younger and now less valid expectations of yourself
realize what you CAN do instead of what you CAN'T. seriously, when I was 23-24.. woah, that's like 10 years ago now... man I am OLD. I felt like such a loser. going nowhere
always looking at my failures

me: I am NOWHERE I thought I would be when I was 18-22
but I adjusted

me: just because you can't find the path you were on previously doesn't mean you're lost


So I had to swallow another pill of mine today.  How can I dispense advice not take some of it myself?  I despise hypocrisy so I am going to try my best to find a new path; give up searching for the old one.  Even though the old one may have been the yellow brick road, maybe it wasn't meant for my feet.  I am sure that now more than ever, I am  meant to walk the tough and uphill road.  Every time I think I find a road that will take me where I want to go, I get thrown off it and land hard on my ass.  But life's a journey right?  I just gotta get up, dust myself off, put my feet on that rough and rocky path and force my tired legs to walk. But that will just make my feet tougher, make my legs stronger, so that when the next obstacle comes, it'll be that much easier to overcome.

Thanks for showing up at the right time today, you've made my day better and my own medicine a little bit easier to swallow.

"It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." - Abraham Maslow