Learning, Growing.

"With every mistake,
We must surely be learning"
--George Harrison

As a kid, I was the 'mature' one. As I've grown, I've been the 'naive' one. Since naivete is associated with innocence, (and innocence with purity) I never took that as an insult...but now I find it's coming to bite me in the ass. I don't know, other than to have been bitten in the ass, how to move past naivete into (what's the opposite of naivete? Aha, the online antonym finder says it's 'sophisticated') a state of sophistication.
I (naively, probably) never thought I was making any mistakes by going to vet school, or--when I realized it was more difficult than I thought it ever could be--continuing on as best I could. There are other situations, recently, too, that seem like mistakes (or judgement lapses) in hindsight, that I couldn't have seen as such going into them due to said naivete.
I'm trying to glean lessons from all these disappointments in my life, so that they're not wasted. I think the biggest lesson I've been learning is that the same personal attributes that make me fun to be with, agreeable, low-maintenance, as well as my 'I will work as well as I can, and expect that everyone else will too; I will be communicative when things are not working, and expect that everyone else will too' attitude (I guess that puts it somewhere between trusting and golden-rule-following), are not neccesarilly appropriate in all situations. Namely, they work beautifully socially but not all the time in the work place, or in school situations. That, in itself, is a disappointment to me about the world, about people. I hate that I can't trust my fellow human beings, and that my example doesn't always osmose to them. Yet, this realization allows me to take more responsibility to try and avoid such situations in the future. (Lame. But helpful.)


I am taking the 'opportunity' of losing a career path and also losing a temporary job to jump headlong into something I hadn't anticipated doing until I was an established veterinarian: dance. I have been working on a business plan, I have been considering LLC/sole proprietorship, planning a trip to San Francisco in November to study more, etc. It's not an enterprise that many people seem excited to endorse me in, or to congratulate me for going for my passion. But I think that's exactly why it's taken me so long to get around to it. No better time than at the bottom to go for it. I have NOTHING to lose. And I am more motivated and excited about it than I've been about anything in a long time. In the meantime, I'm continuing to put my resumes out there, to seek a job that might allow me to make minimum student debt payments. Here I go.