alias_sqbr

A locked post on my flist asked for advice you'd give young people, things you wished someone had told you. Whenever I think of what advice I'd give a younger me I get caught up in specifics and then I get depressed, but it turned out a more general question allowed me to think of something, and I thought I'd record it:

Don't think of life in terms of failure and success. And never think of people that way. Life is not a competition with winners and losers. Every single human being, no matter how limited or flawed, is unique and worthwhile, and that includes you.

The individual things you set your mind to will not always go the way you planned, but that doesn't make you a failure. It doesn't even make those attempts failures: obviously some outcomes are better than others, but at every moment life begins anew and you have to do the best you can with the situation you found yourself in. Learn from and acknowledge the consequences of your choices (especially when they affect others) but do not dwell on them. And sometimes the unexpected places we end up when things go "wrong" are actually pretty cool! Sometimes they're not, and that sucks, but you still just do the best you can with what you've got.

(Inspired in part by an interesting conversation I had with Cameron, where I talked about all the 'failures' in my life, and he had trouble imagining thinking of life in those terms to start with)