Stop, before you break something!

I think too much.

Seriously. Too much for my own good. I spend a great deal of time and effort imaging many possible outcomes to a whole variety of possible occurances. Totally theoretical, and usually based off of my own understanding of how the world works. This means they are vulnerable to the same catastrophic errors in reasoning as most of my other thoughts.

I have an extremely ordered, scientific mind. I understand situations best when there is a clear (no matter how convoluted) trail from cause to effect. This leaves me open to a serious flaw, though. Garbage in, garbage out. This is a principle of computer theory that describes the fact that a computer cannot decide if something is appropriate data without being told specifically what to look for. If the calculation data is not in the proper format, then the answers received (if any) can be vastly removed from actuality.

The same seems to be true of me. If my initial premise is not sound, but I don't realize it, I can easily pile good logic on top of a bad premise, creating a mental house of cards built on a weak foundation.

I bring this up only because I was recently worried that I was going to fail for someone besides myself. Failing myself is easy; I know who to blame, I know what happened, and I can immediately go about fixing the problem. Failing other people, though; that's where it becomes unbearable. Other people have no reason to trust me as much as I trust myself; they have no guarantee that I'm acting in their best interests.

In the past, I was so proud that I retained the good friendship of almost everyone I had ever met. This is sadly no longer true. This crystal situation didn't crack in the last year or three, so don't worry about it being some "stink" still active. Here's what I learned from it, though: no matter what, there are some ways to lose a friendship. And the easiest of those is failing somehow.

The rub is that it doesn't even have to be an actual failure on my part: sometimes just a perceived failure is enough. I'll save the "perception vs. reality" argument for another entry, but there are still some situations where everything done right can still be wrong.

I hate these situations. The illogical nature of some of them nearly ripped my sanity in two. (I'm slowly discovering that nothing makes me more mad or frustrated than illogical behavior) I've been fortunate to be able to revisit a couple, and the post-mortum returned satisfying answers. At least one reason was still completely foolish and incredibly insulting to me, but it was a path of reasoning that someone followed. That part means it cannot be denied.

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