I spent a long time refusing to embrace reality. It would have been so easy to look at the feedback I was getting from the world and adjust, but I always created explanations and narratives that allowed me to keep doing what I was doing.
My life was chaos. I had volatile relationships. I jumped from job to job because of my drinking and drug use. I dropped out of high school and got kicked out of college four times. I got in trouble with the law, and things just got worse and worse for me.
The impressive thing is that I lived this way while thinking I was right.
The problems in my relationships were always everyone else's fault.
It wasn't that I got fired because I got caught drinking on the job or because I didn't show up for three days, it was that my managers just didn't like me, and they were shitty jobs anyway, so I didn't care.
It was my high school's fault that I dropped out. If they had just left me alone and let me do my work, I would have stayed. Besides, they weren't teaching me anything worthwhile anyway.
It was four different colleges' fault for kicking me out. I was paying to be there. They had no business having attendance and grade policies. I should be able to show up as often as I wanted and make whatever grades I made.
It was the cops' fault for harassing me, and the state really had no business making laws about the kinds of things that it made laws about. Why couldn't they leave me alone if I wasn't hurting anybody?
The answer to my problems was so simple that it's embarrassing. I was the problem. I was the common denominator between all the things that were wrong in my life.
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