Black Hat With Gray Streamers

Warning: Pity party ahead.

Okay, maybe not a full-on, pointy-black-hat-with-gray-streamers, dirt in my mouth pity party. Maybe just a little bout of "woe is me." Or maybe a stretch of "What the #%@$&?" instead.

Anyway, I'm in a bruised-feeling funk, and I don't know what to do with myself. Did you ever have one of those stretches where everything you do is wrong? Where you can't get out of your own way and you can't make a call that doesn't make people say, "What were you thinking?" That is, if they're still speaking to you?

That's where I am, that unlovely place. I don't like it here, where my confidence is sapped and I'm questioning everything. I want to crawl in a hole and stay away from everyone. The fewer people I talk to, the fewer I can annoy.

Unless I annoy them by disappearing.

Arggh! It's everybody's favorite, "You can't win for losing."

It's hard when you've done the best you could in every moment, and it's backfired on you; it's harder when you look back and it's pretty clear you should have made a different decision.

Yeah, I know, hindsight is always 20/20, etc., etc., etc. The thing is, sometimes it's clear that in the moment you couldn't have made a different decision. So you let it go. It's no fun, but you let it go. What's harder to let go of is looking back and realizing it could have gone either way, because in the moment of deciding, you had some or all of the information you needed to make a better decision.

And that, as painful as it is, isn't even what's gnawing me and driving me into the cave. It's knowing that other people have been affected by my decisions, and not in a good way, and there's nothing I can do about it, no way I know of to make it right.

So what can I do? Wait.

Wait for time to do its thing, carrying me (and everyone else) past this moment, these days. Things will change, because they never stay the same, and I'll keep making decisions, because you can't stop. (Even choosing not to decide is a decision...and sometimes the worst one you can make.) Hopefully, I'll start making better ones, or if I make bad ones, I'm the only one affected by them.

And in the meantime, I'll think about that black hat with the gray streamers, the one I'm trying not to wear.