small victories (warning: shamelessly self-indulgent long anecdote inside) →[More:]

What small, seemingly insignificant things have you taught yourself/learned how to do in your adult life that have become avatars for personal growth?

Bear with me here.

I have a favourite digital watch that I've had for many years. I used to only wear it during Daylight Savings Time because... you guessed it - I could NOT for the life of me figure out how to set it easily! This now seems patently silly, but honestly the hassle of trying to either RTFM (online or otherwise) or suffer the indignity of asking someone else to set it for me was just too much to deal with. Hence the avoidance measures: in winter I'd wear my analog watch(es), and my favourite (summer-only) watch was relegated to the junk box on my bureau.

The elephant in the room here is kind of twofold (siamese elephant? 2-headed elephant? who knows...). For most of my life, I have been the textbook case of codependence. I still have to watch out for playing the "helpless" card, but nowdays I'm much more inclined to at least try to solve these little problems on my own. My old knee-jerk instinct was just to find someone else to do them for me, or avoid dealing with it altogether. I think most of this was related to various comfortable co-living/LTR situations that never forced me to to learn how to problem-solve effectively on my own. In essence, I spent until roughly age 35 "stuck" in adolescence. Meh, I won't make any apologies, it was the lazy/easy solution for me.

This brings up the 2nd head of the elephant. It is much easier for me to try to solve little things now (i.e. setting my watch, fixing computer problems, cabling together my home theatre system, etc, etc,...) because not only have I figured out how to problem-solve more effectively, I have also learned how to surround myself with people whose first instinct is to cooperate, rather than condescend, or worse yet, just to grab the whatever-it-is I'm fiddling with, roll their eyes, and say "oh, for god's sake, let ME do that...".

Maybe this little revelation is merely part of age and experience, and perhaps it's just personal growth. Could be a 'well, duh' to everyone else here, but I thought I'd share.

All I know is that I grabbed my favourite watch out of the junk box this morning, noticed that it was an hour off, said "hmm...", started pressing a few random, incomprehensible buttons, and after about 30 seconds, et voila! it was all done. For whatever reason, figuring out this silly, everyday task gave me a little kick of pride that I've carried around like a warm fuzzy all day. Thought I'd pass it along, with some whuffles.

::whuffles::