Don’t apologize unless you actually mean it. Saying sorry when you didn’t really mean it, or you did the same thing again only devalues any future apology until it means nothing to the people you care about.
When I was a kid I heard people talking about how kids learn better than adults.
So I realized that the “way a kid’s brain works” is probably correlated with “the way it feels to be conscious as a kid” so I used my autistic super-memory to save a snapshot of the feeling of consciousness itself.
Then I instructed my brain to keep track of that, and never lose it.
Now I’m in my 40s, and I can still learn like a little kid.
If you put in the work upfront it will make the back half easier. If you slack on the front end you’ll need to sprint to the finish.
Mainly came to this conclusion in school with academics, but started applying it to everything. It’s not perfect—you can absolutely work hard and still not get the results because of forces of nature (or oppressive systems). But in general I’ve found it’s a good rule to live by.
As a kid I got a lot of “Do as I say not as I do.”
The lesson I learned is that a lot of grown ups are hypocrites. I saw this so much it made me decide I would always be honest with myself and others about why I was doing the things I was doing. It is not always easy, especially now that I have kids of my own, but it is much healthier in the long run. I teach my kids by example rather than preaching fake piety.
Friends can matter to you more than family, and that’s ok, but family does a lot more for you than you realize.
I didn’t have a great family, but it was only when I was upset about a birthday party when I was like 12 where my mom made all the cards and buttons and stuff and I was so mad that it wasn’t the cool cards and prizes that you buy that I kind of realized it.
It dawned on me like two weeks later that my parents couldn’t afford any of that, but they took time out of their day, for like two weeks, even though they both worked too much, to hand-make approximations as best they could. Without me knowing, so I would be surprised.
Ever work a double shift and then spend the few minutes you have not working, sleeping, or cooking to hand-make party favors? Yeah, me either.
It still makes me cry thinking about how ungrateful I was and the look of sadness and yearning on my mom’s face when I got mad at her for not buying the “good” stuff.
When I was 20, I sat her down and told her about it and how bad I felt, and how I never knew how to apologize for it. We had a good cry, and she thanked me for seeing it eventually, and how happy it retroactively made her knowing I realized it so soon after.
