This is hard to explain.... bare with me.

There are many times in ones' life where you face a crossroads, a decision on how or who you want to be in the world.

For awhile now I've been the type of person that has tried to live looking at everyone's own perspective when it comes to life. More often than not, just to make sure that I understand where someone is coming from; whether I agree with them or not. I feel this is important to me as I have friends and family from different political and religious backgrounds. I may or may not agree with everyone (I rarely do), but understanding and accepting is what I strive to do.

There's one thing I've struggled with though (well... way more than one, but for the sake of this... you get the idea) is peoples' everyday complaints. It bothers me when people complain about things when there are tons of people that would love to have what the complainers have. They'd love to have those things, because they have it worse. I ranted on Facebook a few weeks ago about people bitching about the crappy weather. The complaining came on a morning after the tornado in Oklahoma hit the school and some poor bastard jumped in front of the light rail train in SoDo. I was livid to hear people complain about a few drizzles when parents were digging the bodies of their dead children from the school rubble. I was pissed to hear people complain that it was cold when someone had decided it was better to jump in front of a train than to go on. On top of that, a couple of my students were traumatized by seeing that man get hit by the train.

It's been really hard for me to see or hear people complain about the things in their life. Hearing people bitching about work, how their car broke down, if their team lost, they stubbed their toe, whatever it's been has been driving me crazy. The hardest thing though has been hearing people complain about their kids. Why? Christi has had two miscarriages in the past 6 months. The last one literally almost killed her two weeks ago (if you want details, you can always call/text/email me). It's made me so unbelievably angry, resentful, and bitter towards these people.

However...

I'm figuring out that it's hard for people to compare their life problems. The crappy weather might be the worst thing that's going on in a person's life at that moment. Therefore, it seems to them like the worst thing ever, because there's nothing for them to personally compare it to. The parents that were searching for their kids probably had a little more to be upset about, but the crappy weather person has no way of understanding how parent feels in that moment (unless they've gone through the exact same thing). I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm trying to change...

... but it's difficult.

I'm trying not to qualify (Eh, Shep?) all of our problems and hardships in life. I'm trying to know and understand that whatever issues someone is going though sucks. It sucks for them period.

I'm not assuming that anyone is actually reading this. However, if anything sounds familiar to you in the section about that you may have complained about, assume it probably was you that pissed me off and it is you I'm referring to. Understand though that while I wanted to take a shit on your pillow and/or kick your face in, I still love you. It's just very difficult to be your friend or family right now under these circumstances. Please forgive me for any sarcasm, smart ass comments, hurtful things I've said, or outright ignoring you. It's going to take some time to "heal" and change, but I'm working on it. I'm working on getting on that new path. It's running parallel to the path I'm on, and it's uphill right now, but I'm sure once I get to the top of that hill, it'll be easy to coast the rest of way.