Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous–to poetry. ~Thomas Mann

Kat McNally’s prompt asks us to consider self-compassion: The Buddha said, “You, yourself, as much as anybody else in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

While Project Reverb asks if I was an introvert or extrovert this year.

It really is interesting to me how I find connections between these two each time. I am an introverted extrovert or an extroverted introvert. Let me explain. I do like people and I’m interested in them, but I have a certain amount of time before it gets to be too much. If I have to be very extroverted all day or deal with a lot of conflict (which was most of the last year) I am extremely introverted the rest of the time. Now that I find myself with a manageable amount of interaction, I have more left for friends and my own time. It’s really quite nice to have the desire to do things again. We haven’t done much more than usual—but things only started getting better the first week of November. Still—I find myself wantingto join and go and do, as well as having more energy for creativity.

And self compassion? That’s difficult. I tend to berate myself for mistakes and pick apart wrongpaths and actions. And magnify those so that the good things diminish in comparison. I tend to have much more compassion for others—even forgiving the same hurts over and over over years instead of walking away. But I can see that in the coming year, should things continue somewhat as they have the last month—I will have the energy to work on my health, to with with J on his. To perhaps be less  shy and nervous as a new parent in her school. I hope to forgive myself for my mistakes and learn from them. Sometimes I see them as mountains in my path and they stop me, I hope instead to learn to go around or over instead of turning back.

I often wish I’d done things more artfully than I have but when the outcome is that I am not dealing with ill treatment on a daily basis or being taken advantage of I hope I can learn to accept that sometimes you just have to get to the right place by taking a wrong turn and leave it at that.