Confidence
When I entered into this relationship I'm in now, with the most wonderful girl I have ever had the pleasure of knowing, I promised myself one thing. One thing that I had control over. One thing I could improve on.
Keeping an open line of communication between myself and my significant other.
Now granted, in my last relationship I wasn't the only one who shut down and closed those avenues. It wasn't all my fault that he and I broke up; he shoulders just as much of the blame for that as I do, and looking back, things never would've worked out more than circumstantially.
I have gotten better about telling her things. I usually remember to mention something to her when I'm in pain or sick or depressed or upset, because it's not always as easy to tell that over Skype as it is face-to-face. And she wants -- no, she demands to know when I am. She doesn't want me to keep anything like that from her, even if it will make her worry. And I don't want to keep anything from her. She has seen farther into me, knows me better than anyone else I think I have ever met.
So why is it that I now can't tell her what I want and need to? And the further away it gets from what sparked the thoughts, the less sense it'll make if I can even get the courage to say it aloud.
So what sparked all this shit? Yesterday, I took my Cisco 2 final -- which I was worried about -- and got an 83. Everything was good, everything was going well for the semester, I had (in essence) two classes down for the semester and three to go. I was happy.
Then Jake called. Now let me take this back a month or so. We're trying to move out of this expensive-ass apartment and into a new one. I told him at the end of October that we needed to talk to our current landlord and tell them we have no intention of renewing our lease and plan to be out by the end of December. Sixty days' notice. He insisted that we needed to be sure we could get a new place first, and that the landlord only required 30 days. We fought over it for a while, and I finally gave up and gave in. Now back to yesterday. He called me on a break from work, after I'd already gotten home, and told me he called them (which he said he would do). They said we had to give 60 days. So now we're stuck here through the end of January -- with increased rent for Jan, no less.
But that's okay, I suppose. Last night when he got home we got into a fight over it again, and when I told him "I told you so" and he realised that I *had* told him so, he promised to work overtime at work to make up the difference so that the increased rent wouldn't hit us too bad. And I started looking at the bright side of things. My last assignment for the semester is due Tuesday. So after that point I'll have from then until the second week of January to pack, organise, and clean. Makes things not as rushed. Silver lining.
Today, my fiancee decided to nuke her laptop and upgrade the OS to Ubuntu 10.10. She had already previously backed up her hard drive, so when she got home from work she went to the task. When everything came back up, she went to move her files back to her laptop.
And knocked the external hard drive off the cable whilst it was transferring data.
Suffice it to say, she was pissed off. Not at me, and not at herself (I don't think), but at circumstances, since there was a lot of irreplaceable data on that drive. I should mention here that I think she's not quite used yet to being in a relationship with someone who isn't a complete techno-idiot. (Can't blame her; I know she works in the IT field, and I still sometimes have to go back and keep myself from dumbing down language that I know she'll understand because she knows computers.) With my experience and knowledge, I offered a couple of suggestions that she might not have thought of to try and rescue the data, including one somewhat iffy procedure once she determined that the HDD was well and truly dead. She's at least trying that.
=/ But the thing is, once she was a bit calmer and more level-headed, I wanted to say something about the whole situation. Because I *am* knowledgeable about computers. Maybe not as much as she is (she's a bit better at hardware and Windows troubleshooting than I am), but there are things that I either know from experience or have learned whilst in college that can help certain things. And to be honest, I need the practice at troubleshooting if I am to get any kind of job and hope to keep it (not to mention I am still trying to get my A+, and any troubleshooting experience I can get toward that will help loads). I still don't have a lot of confidence in my abilities with... well, much of anything, even though every time I've worked on a PC I've gotten it to work again (except once, and that laptop was pretty much unrecoverable, and that was several years ago before I knew what I know now). This includes almost everything I've done in Linux, and every PC that I've fixed for other people.
I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to work with computers. I don't have enough confidence in myself to stand my ground when I know I'm right about something. Every day when I wake up, I have this sinking feeling, this little voice in the back of my head that tells me that everything I do that day, I'm going to utterly fail at, because I can't do anything right, because everything I touch turns to shit. It's not true, and I know that in my conscious thought. That little voice that tells me that is an artifact from my childhood, from a little girl whose mother very rarely gave any sort of compliment about anything, unless it was a backhanded one. I know this. So why can't I believe it?
In this case, I know why I haven't said anything aloud. It's because I'm afraid that she'll just get pissed off again, because I'm harping on something that's over and done with, and I should just drop it, like I've been told to do for the better part of seven years, instead of trying to get off my chest what's bringing me down.
(EtA: And yes, I know by posting this she's going to read this and see what I wanted to say, but even now I can't make myself say it aloud.)
Keeping an open line of communication between myself and my significant other.
Now granted, in my last relationship I wasn't the only one who shut down and closed those avenues. It wasn't all my fault that he and I broke up; he shoulders just as much of the blame for that as I do, and looking back, things never would've worked out more than circumstantially.
I have gotten better about telling her things. I usually remember to mention something to her when I'm in pain or sick or depressed or upset, because it's not always as easy to tell that over Skype as it is face-to-face. And she wants -- no, she demands to know when I am. She doesn't want me to keep anything like that from her, even if it will make her worry. And I don't want to keep anything from her. She has seen farther into me, knows me better than anyone else I think I have ever met.
So why is it that I now can't tell her what I want and need to? And the further away it gets from what sparked the thoughts, the less sense it'll make if I can even get the courage to say it aloud.
So what sparked all this shit? Yesterday, I took my Cisco 2 final -- which I was worried about -- and got an 83. Everything was good, everything was going well for the semester, I had (in essence) two classes down for the semester and three to go. I was happy.
Then Jake called. Now let me take this back a month or so. We're trying to move out of this expensive-ass apartment and into a new one. I told him at the end of October that we needed to talk to our current landlord and tell them we have no intention of renewing our lease and plan to be out by the end of December. Sixty days' notice. He insisted that we needed to be sure we could get a new place first, and that the landlord only required 30 days. We fought over it for a while, and I finally gave up and gave in. Now back to yesterday. He called me on a break from work, after I'd already gotten home, and told me he called them (which he said he would do). They said we had to give 60 days. So now we're stuck here through the end of January -- with increased rent for Jan, no less.
But that's okay, I suppose. Last night when he got home we got into a fight over it again, and when I told him "I told you so" and he realised that I *had* told him so, he promised to work overtime at work to make up the difference so that the increased rent wouldn't hit us too bad. And I started looking at the bright side of things. My last assignment for the semester is due Tuesday. So after that point I'll have from then until the second week of January to pack, organise, and clean. Makes things not as rushed. Silver lining.
Today, my fiancee decided to nuke her laptop and upgrade the OS to Ubuntu 10.10. She had already previously backed up her hard drive, so when she got home from work she went to the task. When everything came back up, she went to move her files back to her laptop.
And knocked the external hard drive off the cable whilst it was transferring data.
Suffice it to say, she was pissed off. Not at me, and not at herself (I don't think), but at circumstances, since there was a lot of irreplaceable data on that drive. I should mention here that I think she's not quite used yet to being in a relationship with someone who isn't a complete techno-idiot. (Can't blame her; I know she works in the IT field, and I still sometimes have to go back and keep myself from dumbing down language that I know she'll understand because she knows computers.) With my experience and knowledge, I offered a couple of suggestions that she might not have thought of to try and rescue the data, including one somewhat iffy procedure once she determined that the HDD was well and truly dead. She's at least trying that.
=/ But the thing is, once she was a bit calmer and more level-headed, I wanted to say something about the whole situation. Because I *am* knowledgeable about computers. Maybe not as much as she is (she's a bit better at hardware and Windows troubleshooting than I am), but there are things that I either know from experience or have learned whilst in college that can help certain things. And to be honest, I need the practice at troubleshooting if I am to get any kind of job and hope to keep it (not to mention I am still trying to get my A+, and any troubleshooting experience I can get toward that will help loads). I still don't have a lot of confidence in my abilities with... well, much of anything, even though every time I've worked on a PC I've gotten it to work again (except once, and that laptop was pretty much unrecoverable, and that was several years ago before I knew what I know now). This includes almost everything I've done in Linux, and every PC that I've fixed for other people.
I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to work with computers. I don't have enough confidence in myself to stand my ground when I know I'm right about something. Every day when I wake up, I have this sinking feeling, this little voice in the back of my head that tells me that everything I do that day, I'm going to utterly fail at, because I can't do anything right, because everything I touch turns to shit. It's not true, and I know that in my conscious thought. That little voice that tells me that is an artifact from my childhood, from a little girl whose mother very rarely gave any sort of compliment about anything, unless it was a backhanded one. I know this. So why can't I believe it?
In this case, I know why I haven't said anything aloud. It's because I'm afraid that she'll just get pissed off again, because I'm harping on something that's over and done with, and I should just drop it, like I've been told to do for the better part of seven years, instead of trying to get off my chest what's bringing me down.
(EtA: And yes, I know by posting this she's going to read this and see what I wanted to say, but even now I can't make myself say it aloud.)