The Year of the Unicorn - Lesson 5: Shine

One year after my first foray into Dungeon Masterdom and with much knocking on wood and crossing of fingers, I finally hosted the 3rd(ish) session of our campaign.

Any tabletop gamer will tell you that the most dreaded adversary the players will face is the Almighty Calendar. Even so, three sessions in the course of a year is a little extreme. Of course, it wasn’t merely an issue of scheduling. The night of our first game, a shocking secret came to light, one that completely rewrote my future.

Pretty high drama even for Dungeons & Dragons, amirite?

The next few months were extremely emotional and confusing for me. To cling to my gaming theme here, I was desperately trying to play an unwinnable game governed by a Game Master who had little interest in the rule book and whose primary goal was to convince me to give up on the game by myself.

But I’m a tenacious little scamp, and I didn’t want to give up. I’d vowed to play that game, nurture that game, celebrate that game’s anniversary, maybe have a family with that game… Right, enough of the strained metaphor, you get it. The point is this: I’d committed my heart and my future to someone who no longer felt committed in return, and who was hoping she could shake me off so her conscience wouldn’t have to carry the guilt of leaving me herself.

Obviously, I’ve simplified and vague-ified an incredibly complex situation. However, the time has passed for me to keep defending someone who spent the better part of a year gaslighting and villainizing me for the preservation of her own ego.

Because that’s the truth of it. Whether with malicious intent or not, I was wronged by the person I trusted most, around whom I was my most authentic self. I acknowledge the fallibility of all individuals involved, but that doesn’t invalidate the mistreatment I experienced.

It is painful for me to write it out like that. To state unequivocally that I was treated unfairly at best, outright cruelly at worst. I have spent eight months scrutinizing every shortcoming within myself, every emotional reaction, every selfish impulse, every unkind word that I unleashed during the slow and torturous death of my marriage. I stood as far back from my own life as I could to analyze my behavior at a cold, impersonal distance. I agonized into the wee hours of the morning about whether I could have handled anything differently, trying to figure out if I was the toxic bad guy in someone else’s fairy tale.

Here I am on the other side of that process, near what would have been my third wedding anniversary, with this knowledge: I did the best that I could and the best that could be reasonably expected of anyone undergoing the trial I was going through. I’m far from perfect, but I fought hard, right up to the end, and I’m satisfied with my efforts.

I’m not all the way done processing what happened, and I’m still working out the balance between kindness to those who have hurt me and kindness toward myself, but I’ve made enough progress that I finally feel like I can open myself back up again in order to:

Shine

Which brings me back to D&D. It takes a certain measure of confidence to tell your group of friends: “HEY. I’m going to lead us all in an elaborate, dice-based storytelling activity because I think my Fantasy Setting and Vague Plot are so worthy of attention that I want you to make up characters for it and then play out their adventures under my omnipotent oversight.”

I am very exposed as a Dungeon Master. I screw up rules and forget important details. I have to think on the fly and some of those flying thoughts are Not Great. For the duration of each hours-long session, I am constantly performing, which makes my ego constantly vulnerable.

Why would I do that to myself? A solid 70% of my blog entries talk about my life-stunting fear of failure. I hate creating opportunities to display my flaws, and yet at least once a month, I run a game that I still don’t fully understand and which I will definitely mess up multiple times.

But I love D&D, and despite my shortcomings, I’m a pretty decent DM. At least, that’s the feedback that I’m getting from my players, and I trust that they’re either being honest with me or are lying to me because they love me enough to support my nonsense even if I’m terrible at it. I truly can’t complain about either option!

The thing is, playing this game with my friends fills my chest with light. A golden glow expands within me every time I do something I love with the people I love, whether it’s D&D or hiking or perusing antiques. I get to shine for a moment, and it feels like being in love.

For months, I’ve been scared about my capacity to experience that kind of emotion again. I had such a deep well of love in me before, and the night I of my breakup, it all drained out. I felt it so physically: broken glass ribs and a black hole heart, a sharp void where all my softness was supposed to be.

I never wanted to feel like that again, but I also wanted to get my warmth back. I compromised by being extremely forthright with everyone, thinking that I was taking away their ammunition and softening the sting of their inevitable abandonment.

I wasn’t quite as blatant about it, but my method was basically this:

“Hi! You may know me as your friend or tolerated acquaintance Abi. I struggle to process words during phone calls, I thrive in clutter like some kind of trinket-goblin, and I only found out this year that vermilion is a shade of red, not green (and I looked it up just now to make sure!). So when you get sick of me in a couple years despite your promises of affection, don’t pretend you didn’t know what you were getting into, because I put it all right there on the label, like a list of allergens on a box of Cheez-Its!”

Like, the number 4 is soft-spoken and friendly and the best buddy of 5, who is really bold and a little cocky but essentially a good dude.

What started as a self-effacing method of defense, however, became something bigger. I went from showcasing my faults to deliberately engaging in the things I enjoy, even at the risk of exposure and embarrassment. I wanted the people I cared for to see all of me, to get a full picture so they could decide for themselves whether our relationship was tenable.

And it felt good. Boldly dressing up for conventions and fairs, traveling to visit friends I’d fallen away from, just being my loud, enthusiastic, hyper-expressive self as fearlessly as I could manage… Everything fueled the fire in my chest, and that fire began to cauterize my wounds.

There is now more warmth than ache in my soul. I am surrounded by people who know my faults and love me nonetheless. I still sometimes worry about being “too much” or “not enough,” but that worry doesn’t cripple me anymore, and I’m fortunate to have folks in my life who will listen to my insecurities with kindness and patience instead of anger and exasperation.

I hope that by allowing myself to feel that shiny joy inside of me again, I can help others access their own joy. I want to keep my spark alive even when life isn’t all moonbeams and rainbow sprinkles. I want to be a unicorn in a herd of unicorns, watching my loved ones shine as they unabashedly pursue their passions and open their hearts to each other.

There’s always a chance that I’ll experience more devastation by letting my walls down like this, but now I know that the glow never really disappears. The ember endures, and it can always be coaxed back to life.

I’m tired and battered but still shining, and I have one last Year of the Unicorn lesson in my heart. It’s been my biggest challenge, but I’m almost there.

Soon.

Header photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels

The Year of the Unicorn - Lesson 4: You Make Your Own Meaning

The worst happens.

That’s the lesson I thought I was learning for a couple months. The phrase came with a sense of peace, though it didn’t seem like it should. I gazed out of my crumbling tower and saw my friends in the windows of their own falling fortresses, the foundations of their lives cracking beneath their feet. Every headline in my newsfeed punched me in the gut, never allowing me to catch my breath between blows. The angry goblin voice in my head that I thought I’d finally muted pushed its way to the front of my brain to scream, “Ha! Told you so! The worst always happens! You are helpless to stop it! Life is just a sequence of random, meaningless cruelties!”

It was hard to argue with that. Doing so felt naive and deluded. I talk a lot about positive psychology and how we can improve our lives by improving our attitudes and expectations. It’s easy for me to proselytize that concept when I’m in a position of privilege, when I already live a life filled with fortune, in which I don’t fear running out of food or being shot at a routine traffic stop or being detained in a concentration camp. Positive thinking isn’t enough to save anyone from poverty, racism, disease (and its associated expenses), or any number of real-world threats to our physical needs.

When faced with the horrors of reality, both on a personal and a global scale, searching for meaning can feel not only pointless, but potentially insulting. How can you justify telling someone with a terminal illness that it’s all part of a divine plan? How dare we assign meaning to the preventable deaths of migrant children or dozens of US mass shooting casualties? Is it foolish to even ponder these individual or national catastrophes with a massive climate disaster on the horizon? What meaning can you glean from the avoidable destruction of the only planet currently capable of sustaining life as we know it?

Even typing that paragraph is enough to tip me toward an existential spiral. Understandable, then, that I’ve been really considering this lesson, letting it marinate in my brain juices. “The worst happens” isn’t a particularly unicorny idea, nor is “Your anxiety was right: everything is awful and we’re all going to die soon, probably.”

The Year of the Unicorn is supposed to be about seeing the world with childlike wonder and contributing our own brand of magic to it. It’s about joy and connection in spite of the hungry darkness pursuing us all. It’s about this bittersweet concept:

You Make Your Own Meaning

There’s this quirky video game called Night in the Woods (NitW) that I fell in love with last year (only last year? Wow, jeez, time is weird and fake). Playing it feels like coming home to a place that I didn’t know was my home, and that’s partly because I so strongly identify with the protagonist. So strongly, in fact, that if I’d found the game any earlier, I probably wouldn’t have been emotionally equipped to handle it.

The main character, Mae, struggles with mental health issues that look a lot like mine (the description of a depersonalization/derealization episode that she experiences is what made me recognize and then forgive myself for a similar experience of my own. No joke.). She’s haunted by the passing of a grandparent that she was exceptionally close to. She climbs things she’s not supposed to climb. She says things like this, which could easily have been part of my previous Year of the Unicorn lesson:

Just because that online test said that your best chance at being happy is a situation where everyone already likes you but they mostly leave you alone except when they're delivering food to you... that doesn't mean you can hide in your room and wait for that to happen. That's how hermits are made, Mae. And they die alone in the middle of winter. Waiting for pizza from friends they don't want to see.

Plus she’s an anthropomorphic cat, so… I was doomed from the start.

I bring up this game and this character for a couple of reasons. First reason being that I dragged my friends into cosplaying it with me at Gen Con this weekend. Check it:

Second reason is because of another quote that stuck with me months after finishing the game:

But when I die, I want it to hurt. When my friends leave, when I have to let go, when this entire town is wiped off the map, I want it to hurt. Bad. I want to lose. I want to get beaten up. I want to hold on until I'm thrown off and everything ends. And you know what? Until that happens, I want to hope again. And I want it to hurt. Because that means it meant something. It means I am something, at least... Pretty amazing to be something, at least...

NitW deals with a lot of issues, ranging from mental illness to economic inequality to organized religion to supernatural murder cults… But I’m getting off track. The point is, hopelessness and the search for meaning are front and center throughout the story, and it’s not always a chipper story.

The terrible events in your story are the irritants in the oyster’s innards, painful parasites or detritus that get coated over with time and effort to make something that’s not just pretty but gentler on the mullosk’s insides. The process of making a pearl of meaning requires effort and hope. And it hurts, but the hurt is what makes it real. The hurt makes way for something softer.

Maybe that’s just a story I’m telling myself to explain the pain away. But even if it is, what of it? If it helps, if it gives me a moment of peace and perspective, then it’s worth it. It’s a gift I can give myself.

Perhaps that’s how meaning works. In the face of the worst tragedies of your life, it may be one more unfair burden on your already bent heart, but it’s up to you to make meaning. Find a glimmer of light in the muck and carry it with you.

While I was digging around for those game quotes, I came across one more gem:

So I believe in a universe that doesn't care and people who do.

Worst case scenario, the thing I feared when I first contemplated the idea that the worst can and does happen, is that there’s no great cosmic reason for these hardships. The horrible randomness of it threatened to drown me. But even in a universe that doesn’t care (and I’m not saying that’s true), there are people who do.

There are people who care for you now. There are people you’ve yet to meet who will care for you. There are people who used to care for you, people who left you for one reason or another, people whose paths diverged from yours, people who are gone. Simply, achingly, impossibly gone. But for a time, they were there, caring for you, shaping your life, creating something with you.

And if nothing else, you always have yourself. You have these resources at your disposal to make a greater meaning out of all of this. Even if that greater meaning is something as simple as: “Life is hard, but jalapeno poppers are cheap.”

Or maybe: “I didn’t get the time I wanted with this place, or this career, or this person, but I’ll carry the good parts of that time forward and be better for it.”

So I’m making meaning for myself in wine-drenched 3 A.M. heart-to-hearts with my besties, in time spent walking my dogs in the sunshine, and in moments alone in the woods appreciating the susurration of the wind through the treetops.

It doesn’t obliterate the evil in this world. It doesn’t eradicate the gnawing grief in my bones. But it’s something to keep my soul alight so that I can live to see (and help create) a sunnier future. Sometimes, at least for this unicorn, that has to be enough.

The Year of the Unicorn - Lesson 3: Reach Out

Before the rest of my guests arrived for the unicorn-themed party I threw for myself last weekend, two of my closest friends appeared at my door to help me prep and to present me with a few hostess gifts. One of the boxes contained a festive trio of spices. While I inspected them, my friends explained their purpose with the affectionate bluntness that only a pair of Scorpios can offer.

“So you can start cooking real meals for yourself again,” said one.

“You ate frozen pizza three times last week,” said the other.

I’m sure I turned several colors as I mumbled a thank you and set the box down on my counter. It went without saying that I’d devoured each flat, cardboardy pizza in entirety on three separate days, leaving no leftovers and considering that and my breakfast Slim-Fast shakes to be sufficient for my daily nutrition. I wanted to protest and explain that I did occasionally cook for myself, but they’d already seen the contents of my fridge: multiple rows of condiments, a drawer of sliced cheddar, and several half-empty bottles of alcohol.

The truth is, I’ve only truly cooked when I’ve had company in the past three months. Otherwise, I’ve been falling back on my old bachelor habit of relying on frozen food and raw carrots for almost every meal.

And that’s not the only habit that’s been returning now that I’m solo again. Now that my free time is entirely my own, there’s nothing to stop me from staying up all night obsessively editing my latest drafts, or wasting entire Sunday afternoons binge-watching The Tick on Amazon. I can indulge in all the things that would drive a companion crazy, like alternating watching five minutes of a movie with reading five pages of my homework, or sing-narrating my entire laundry process. With no one to break up the routine, I repeat the same schedule every day, like an NPC in the blandest open world video game you’ve ever played. I may shake things up for a weekend adventure (usually prompted by someone else), but otherwise, I stay on my little track, blurring time via repetition.

In short, I’m functional but a bit off-kilter, like an abandoned robot trying to make meaning out of obsolete processes. Which sounds kinda sad now that I’ve typed it out, but it’s also the plot of Wall-E, so it’s probably fine.

Source

For the most part, I enjoy the solitude and control of having space and time to myself. I’m not prone to loneliness and I excel at entertaining myself. As a kid, I imagined adulthood very much like this: solitary but not sad. Lord of my own private castle, attended by a small fleet of animal companions. Things could be much worse.

But then there are nights that are too cold and silent for me to find healing in. I fill my home with music and podcasts so I don’t have to endure the emptiness of those evenings, but that’s the emotional equivalent of putting a band-aid over the stub of a missing finger.

Luckily, I learned this lesson some time ago and have been deliberately applying it now:

Reach Out

It took me a long, long time to wrap my head around this one, despite a lifetime of supportive friends/family members and a massive archive of research that supports how emotionally, psychologically, and physically vital it is to nurture social bonds.

I’ve talked about this a lot: I’m an anxious little goblin. I’m irreconcilably weird. I am neurologically impaired when it comes to facial recognition. My brain has a lot going on it in that makes socializing uncomfortable, but I’ve worked hard to address my insecurities and forgive myself for my inevitable blunders.

I am so, so grateful that my hard work allowed me to reach out after my divorce and that I had so many people willing to listen to me and help.

Even though I shut a lot of those people out during my marriage’s decline.

I screwed up. I got scared and doubled down on my most intimate, most legally and emotionally committed relationship. I didn’t want to embarrass Kelsey (or myself) by talking to “outsiders” about what was going wrong, what was hurting me. I didn’t want to burden anyone with my suffering. I didn’t want to hear the people I loved telling me that my efforts to reanimate a dead relationship by conducting electricity through my own body like a mad scientist from a 1940s horror flick were futile and foolish.

This, of course, made it all the more traumatic when the actual separation occurred with the suddenness and shock of a beheading, my head cleaved from my shoulders with altogether too much ease, like the act of discarding me was as effortless as passing a knife through warm butter. It felt like all the love and trust I thought I’d been pouring into our marriage had been sucked through a black hole instead, leaving me hollow-chested and headless in my empty house.

(How embarrassing.)

Fortunate, then, that rather than mounting a red-eyed steed and haunting Sleepy Hollow in search of vengeance, I corrected my mistake of self-isolation and reached back out to my loved ones.

Our relationships are shields. Our true friendships are mystical healing pods (you know, like in Voltron). There is so much power in the simple act of listening to and understanding another human being. That’s why reaching out is such potent medicine.

I’m not always good at taking my medicine. As much as I’m working to accept myself, warts and all, I still fear making a fool of myself in front of others. But it’s not fair to leave all the work of reaching out to my friends. I have to remind myself to text first sometimes, or follow up on a situation one of my besties is going through, or schedule the next session for my D&D campaign, even when I’m scared of being a crappy DM.

Which is part of why I threw a goofy party for myself last week, despite my anxiety. I wanted to reach out and put some sunshine back into my life and (hopefully) the lives of my friends. We decorated unicorn headbands, ate unspeakable quantities of snacks, and played dumb games together for a few hours. It was nice. I want to throw more events like that, random excuses to get the gang together (a daunting task for all us busy adults).

I’m grateful for everyone who has responded to my attempts to connect. Whether by cheering me up with nonsensical memes or including me on random excursions or checking in to make sure I’m eating vegetables, I know I have a wonderful band of people looking out for me.

My heart is still broken. I don’t know if I still have access to the depths of love and trust that I used to take for granted within myself. But in order to keep finding wonder in the world, I have to keep reaching. So I’ll continue trying my best, connecting to the people I love, and cooking meals for myself again, maybe even with vegetables.

The Year of the Unicorn - Lesson 2: Change is the Only Constant

Between driving to work one morning and driving home, a stoplight appeared on my route. This shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’ve been navigating the construction zone for months now and have frequently passed under the bar of the stoplight, the light fixtures themselves black-bagged overhead like Scooby-Doo villains waiting to be unmasked. Rationally, I knew the bags would come off and the lights would be put into effect someday.

Despite the months of foreshadowing, however, I nearly slammed on my brakes as I approached the new and very vividly green light over the intersection, suddenly unsure of which color meant “stop.” I lurched through the crossing, grateful that no one had been behind me while I suffered my mini-stroke. It took my heart two blocks to dislodge itself from my throat.

Inexplicably, I was pissed. You think you can just turn on one day and expect me to obey you, stoplight? Is this my life now? Occasionally having to stop at an additional intersection on my commute to and from the office? How dare you impede me?

Change often elicits a strong emotional response from me, even if it’s out of proportion and ultimately fleeting. I’ve given a eulogy for a fried laptop. I felt betrayed by the gas station next to my office when they stopped stocking my favorite flavor of energy drink. Just a couple weeks ago, I endured a wave of sorrow after seeing an old sports bar transition into a Mexican restaurant. I had no connection to that bar. I’d never been inside it. I never intended to go inside it. I am far, far more likely to visit now that enchiladas verdes and margaritas are on the menu. So why did I tear up to see the new paint job?

Change is death and so change is mourned. We grieve the end of the old even when it makes way for something better (like enchiladas verdes and margaritas). We grieve even when the stakes are low. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stage model of grief (flawed as it may be decades after development) applies not only to life-or-death traumas but to smaller life changes as well. Grief is grief.

Which is a bummer of sorts, considering my next Year of the Unicorn lesson is:

Change is the Only Constant

The expression comes from the philosopher Heraclitus, who was kind of a turd (but with a name like that, can we really fault him?). The associated Greek phrase Panta Rhei may also ring a bell, translating to “everything flows” or “life is flux,” or so the internet informs me. It’s the concept that you may step in the same river twice, but is it really the same river? The waters are eternally changing, moment to moment. Our perception of “same” is not really sameness. Life is constant transition.

That concept initially scared me. If all is flux, where is the stability? What river rock can I grab hold of to keep from drowning when even the stones are doomed to erode? Must I spend my life fighting the current? What an exhausting existence!

Heraclitus would agree, calling that desire to cling an unnatural and detrimental impulse. If life is flowing and you as an individual refuse to flow with it, then are you really participating in life?

And then Heraclitus would declare himself the only “woke” person at the party and go sit in a corner to mutter cryptically to himself and weep over the foolishness of man.

Super relatable expression though. Source

So the “natural” way to deal with change is to flow with it, right? But that’s a terrifying thought. That means letting go of that river rock and tumbling downstream. It means being battered against boulders and dragged across the stony riverbed. It means spending some time with your head under the surface, blind and spiraling.

In such a circumstance, your fluidity will save you. Bracing against every impact only results in bruises… Why not move as the river moves? Bend around the obstacles, loosen your limbs and let yourself float downstream.

Which is all nice and romantic in theory, but painful in practice. Lately, I’ve been scrabbling for a handhold as I plunge through the rapids of my life. This is not the river cruise I signed up for. I didn’t add this crap to my vision board. I desperately want to swim upstream, back to familiar vistas and predictable waters.

However, no amount of doggy-paddling can transport me back through time. I’m tired, y’all. The current is strong, and I’m learning to yield to it.

This is not the first dramatic life change I’ve experienced and it probably (hopefully!) won’t be the last. Good things have come from those changes, rough as they were at the time. Change is death and change is life (Heraclitus’s Unity of Opposites and all that): I’ve lost wonderful things, but also gained new treasures. The river has carried me to beautiful vantage points, despite taking me through patches of churning whitewater.

My Year of the Unicorn is all about regaining a sense of wonder toward everything life offers. If the essence of life is change, then that means I need to appreciate change as well, whether it’s a new stoplight or an emptier home. If change is constant, then there will be joy again if my heart is open to it. The trick is to remain receptive, flexible, and optimistic.

Floating ain’t easy, but it does give you a good view of the clouds.

The Year of the Unicorn - Lesson 1: Humans Are Fallible

Last year, I accidentally won a silent auction item which contained a coupon for a free Angel Card reading. You ever participate in a silent auction just because you want to say you participated in a silent auction? That’s how you win Angel Card readings, as it turns out. But I’m super into that kinda thing, so I forgot about it for a few months, suddenly remembered, and then managed to schedule a session with the reader with a couple weeks to spare before the coupon’s expiration date.

We met at a Starbucks where I nervously nursed an iced chai while we discussed my fate for about an hour. I like reading Tarot (if nothing else, it forces a perspective shift and gets me out of negative cyclical thinking patterns), so watching her place the cards in a ring to represent the months of 2019 felt familiar and comforting. The terrifying void of the future seems more tangible and therefore manageable when it’s laid out in a tidy 12 card circle, after all.

That void of 2019 loomed large for me at the time. Painful stuff was happening in my marriage and I felt I had no one to turn to who would understand or be able to help me sort through my own complex feelings. Plus, I didn’t want to hurt my wife by going too public with my hurt and fear. It was a complicated situation. A story for another time, maybe. I don’t think it’s fully my story to tell yet, despite the agonized part of me that wants nothing more than to scream my pain from the rooftops for the sake of my own relief and validation.

Anyway. A nice circle of 12 cards and a single card in the center to represent the overall theme of 2019:

Enchantment.

Enchantment ~ Card Meaning: “Recapture your childlike sense of wonder and awe. View the world as a magical place.” - Healing With The Angels Oracle Card deck, by Doreen Virtue, Ph.D

Golly, I sure do miss having the ability to resize images on this website. Anyhoo. I suppose that just means you get an extra-close look at the Enchantment card, which features everyone’s favorite fictional ungulate, the unicorn (actually, now that I think about it, there’s a pretty long list of mythical creatures with hooves, but are you really going to rank a Minotaur above a unicorn? Trick question. Don’t answer that.).

According to the reader (the very kind and joy-inspiring Karmen Fink), 2019 would be my year to embrace my magic and bring forward the suppressed pieces of myself that had taken the backseat in favor of the serious business of adulthood. In late 2018, my world looked bleak. In 2019, there would be a chance to reclaim some of my lost wonder and joy.

But there are no free lunches, are there?

My freedom and opportunity for joyful, unicorn-powered transformation came at a hell of a cost. My marriage ended in April despite my desperate attempts to save it. My soul feels skewered and I spend most days in a fog, mechanically going through the motions of survival now that the foundations of my future have been yanked from under my feet.

Through all the confusion and suffering, however, I’m learning some lessons and searching for a path through the unknown. I’m living my Year of the Unicorn, and this is the first lesson I’ve managed to digest:

Humans Are Fallible

I’ve known for a long, long time that I am fallible. I review my mistakes to an unhealthy extent and focus more on my shortcomings than my victories. I make a point of bettering myself wherever I can, though I’m not always successful (another shortcoming!). When something goes wrong, my first thought is always: “What did I screw up this time?”

There’s a flip side to fixating solely on my own real or perceived mistakes: I tend to ignore the possibility that other people can mess up too. Kinda self-absorbed of me, to be honest.

This isn’t about me faulting others or transferring blame for the sake of my own ego (though I’ve been guilty of that as well). This is about compassion. This is about not only recognizing that other people can make mistakes, but that empathy and grace should be extended to them despite those mistakes.

People screw up. People fail to think logically. People experience unresolvable internal conflicts that alter their decisions and interactions with the world. I am a being made of oopsie-dammits, and you probably are too.

A mistake by definition is an unintentionally wrong action. Nobody wants to botch a presentation at work or overcook their chicken parm, but these things happen despite our best intentions and most thorough preparations. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world full of other people who understand that and cut you some slack when you fail?

I’m trying to be a person who does that, and I’ve been on a trajectory toward that mindset since the start of my marital implosion. Instead of fuming over the driver that pulled out in front of me, I cool myself off and consider that it was a lapse in their judgment, and at least we didn’t hit each other. Instead of assuming a server is being rude to me out of spite, I recognize that they’re just trying to get through their shift, and their brusque greeting probably has nothing to do with me. In short, I’m determined to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I’m offering kindness first instead of offense or malice.

It’s not easy, and there are of course people who will act with deliberate cruelty toward you in this world. There are also the people who make mistakes that harm you directly, and then handle those mistakes poorly, even callously. Again: fallible, fallible humans.

For the most part, though, people are the flawed protagonists of their own narratives, and you have the opportunity to be a tolerant and positive background or supporting character in their story every once in a while. Perhaps someone can do the same for you in your own “hero’s journey”.

That said, acknowledging that all people err is not the same as automatically dismissing all errors. I’m simply aiming to start with a compassionate attitude, aware that my compassion may occasionally be misplaced (still, that’s a mistake I’m willing to make!). You can be wronged by people, intentionally or unintentionally. Only you can determine the parameters of your tolerance. At some point, you must prioritize compassion for yourself.

But I still think that erring on the side of forgiveness is kinder not just to others but to your own heart. That driver who cut me off in traffic? I didn’t have to hold that sense of anger and indignation in my heart for more than a couple seconds. I let it go, and the weight lifted from my chest.

Not everything slides off so easily. I am still learning the lesson of fallibility and struggling to master the magic of kindness despite experiencing the emotional equivalent of that one Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff comic about the stairs.

Yeah, that’s the one. Source

Anyway. It’s a lesson in progress, but I’m getting the hang of it. If I’m to find my wonder again and become that joy-sparking unicorn that I aspire to be, I need to worry less about the things that have gone wrong and focus on the good that still exists in this world.

I’m encountering other lessons as well, but I need more time to absorb those before I share them. I’m probably jumping the gun on this lesson too, but hey: learning never ends. I may as well share my work in progress. It will give me a benchmark for the future.

This is my Year of the Unicorn, and I’m just getting started.