I’ve written a lot of posts about relationships and communication over the last few years.
Sometimes that causes a problem for me.
I usually tell people “If I sound like I know what I’m talking about, it’s because I’m either quoting Dan Savage or it’s something that I’ve screwed up in the past.”
And I have screwed up a lot in the past. And I’ve done a lot of work on and with myself to improve.
But.
Sometimes I get overconfident. Sometimes I forget that I have to keep doing the work. And then I screw up, and things get worse, and I recover, and improve.
And that’s the way it usually works.
Look, here’s a graph to illustrate:
Improvement tends to have loops and backsliding and be irregular as all hell. The important thing is that the overall trend is upward. It’s great if your best is way better than you were before. But it means something if your worst is better than your worst before.
That said… if you’re dealing with someone who is trying to improve, that does not mean that you have to put up with behavior that violates your boundaries or hurts you… even if they’re improving.
Don’t forget that either.
Featured Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash