If there’s one emotion that’s colored my entire year, it’s been anger. I’m doing my best with the hand that I’ve been dealt, but I’m realizing now that the man I dreamed I would be just might not ever happen. It’s making me pissed.
Let’s start off with things that I just haven’t learned:
- controlling my emotions and impulses
- how to trust people — i pretty much don’t
- live in community and forge good relationships
- how to organize for positive, social change
This pretty much makes my life a solitary hell-hole. I’m working on learning these things, though.
Now I’ll reflect on those things that I should’ve been taught by school or my parents but wasn’t. This is stuff I’ve learned on my own and often with the help of strangers, and I’m glad that I learned these things.
- communicate well
- how to meet the women I want without using the Internet
- manage financial matters
- code for a living
- do practical things, to clean, cook, make, repair, grow food
- be good mannered and know etiquette
- accept responsibility
- deal with grief, loss, and suffering
- clicker training dogs
Now that I look at it, my college degree is pretty useless except for down economic times when some HR stooge has to choose between someone with a degree and someone without. I really think my parents short changed me because during summers they would keep my locked up in my house, and I never really learned how to socialize or keep friendships. That really makes me and my dog, Niles, really similar because his previous owners locked him up in a yard, too, and that’s one of the reasons he’s messed up.
What do you wish your parents or school taught you but didn’t? What did you learn on your own, and were glad you did?