25 Things: #2 - Amanda in seven words
The single guiding principle in my life has been "No one ever told me I couldn't." I mean that in the sense that no one discouraged me early on, though I am also a master of the concept of "better to ask forgiveness than permission."
I attribute this to my maternal line, which consisted of a woman scorned who spent most of the rest of her life trying to prove that she didn't need a man, a woman largely ignored in her own childhood because of a disabled younger sister, and a woman who was an alcoholic for thirty years until the day she quit cold turkey. None of them ever told me that anything was too hard for me, even when it very clearly was. When I whined that something was hard, their knee-jerk reaction was to show me what I was doing wrong rather than let me use it as an excuse to stop, and by the time I was old enough to use it as an excuse myself, I had already developed the habit of saying "What am I doing wrong?" rather than "It's too haaaaaaard."
I also suspect that my grandmother had some words with a few people at my school-- I never had very many teachers with negative attitudes, but the few that I did went away rather abruptly. I was too young at the time to question it though, and with age it's possible that those memories have been bent to match my later perceptions.
The plus side of that sort of upbringing is that I'm pretty willing to jump into a new situation feet-first and learn by doing. The minus is that because I'm the one most willing to jump into a task that I don't know how to do, I also tend to be the one who gets stuck with the more annoying tasks. (This is particularly irritating right now, since the bookkeeping for our company is one of those annoying tasks that I ended up doing because I didn't know enough to say "not in a million years". January through "whenever I manage to get all the numbers to line up enough to do taxes" is my least-favorite time of year.)
The other minus is that I sometimes (*cough* frequently *cough*) bite off a bit more than I can chew. Not only did I not learn that I can't do something, I didn't manage to fully learn that I can't do everything. This is how I end up with lists of projects that span five pages of lined notepaper. It's also how I end up deciding to write 25 long journal entries instead of one journal entry with 25 bullet points. I'm *trying* to learn the concept of finishing one project before starting another, and it's definitely getting better than it has been in the past, but my project list is still 3 pages long right now.
I attribute this to my maternal line, which consisted of a woman scorned who spent most of the rest of her life trying to prove that she didn't need a man, a woman largely ignored in her own childhood because of a disabled younger sister, and a woman who was an alcoholic for thirty years until the day she quit cold turkey. None of them ever told me that anything was too hard for me, even when it very clearly was. When I whined that something was hard, their knee-jerk reaction was to show me what I was doing wrong rather than let me use it as an excuse to stop, and by the time I was old enough to use it as an excuse myself, I had already developed the habit of saying "What am I doing wrong?" rather than "It's too haaaaaaard."
I also suspect that my grandmother had some words with a few people at my school-- I never had very many teachers with negative attitudes, but the few that I did went away rather abruptly. I was too young at the time to question it though, and with age it's possible that those memories have been bent to match my later perceptions.
The plus side of that sort of upbringing is that I'm pretty willing to jump into a new situation feet-first and learn by doing. The minus is that because I'm the one most willing to jump into a task that I don't know how to do, I also tend to be the one who gets stuck with the more annoying tasks. (This is particularly irritating right now, since the bookkeeping for our company is one of those annoying tasks that I ended up doing because I didn't know enough to say "not in a million years". January through "whenever I manage to get all the numbers to line up enough to do taxes" is my least-favorite time of year.)
The other minus is that I sometimes (*cough* frequently *cough*) bite off a bit more than I can chew. Not only did I not learn that I can't do something, I didn't manage to fully learn that I can't do everything. This is how I end up with lists of projects that span five pages of lined notepaper. It's also how I end up deciding to write 25 long journal entries instead of one journal entry with 25 bullet points. I'm *trying* to learn the concept of finishing one project before starting another, and it's definitely getting better than it has been in the past, but my project list is still 3 pages long right now.