there's a rant in me somewhere about the difference between having things happen and having things happen to you, and the importance of being an active participant in your own life.

if things just happen to you; there you were, just innocently minding your own business as you so often are, and poof! all these bad things happened to you, well, i don't have a lot of sympathy. it's a lot easier for people to walk all over you if you're lying on the floor to start with.

if things happen, however, and yup, you did this thing that probably played into it, and now you can do this other thing to work on making things better, good for you. let me know what i can do to help.

a friend of mine posted something in her journal a bit ago about how difficult it is to recognize one's own bad actions and deeds; how it's easy to recognize when someone treated you poorly, but not so easy to think about how you treated them.

i've treated some people not very well. i am a tin-plated bitch when i am depressed and scared. that's a reason, not an excuse. knowing why it happened doesn't make it okay, doesn't absolve me of the responsibility of trying to make sure that i don't do that again.

but i know what happened. and i know my part in it. and i think i can manage things a little better in the future than i did in the past.