Author Archives: Christy Wulff

Mistakes

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Welp, you’ve done it now. You’ve messed up. Big time. You probably let someone you care about down in the process. Perhaps you’re a psychopath and that doesn’t bother you, but for the rest of us…it sucks. Then comes the advice. “You can’t cry over spilt milk. You can’t change the past. Use it as a learning experience.” While all of that is true, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help the knot in your stomach or the sadness in your heart or the disappointment in your soul.

So what are you really going to do?

  • Own up. There are few things worse than blame passing. This is your fault. I’m sure there are about 150 very good excuses as to why it happened, but none of them matter. No one is perfect and most reasonable human beings are aware of this. Stand up. Take responsibility and vow to never EVER do it again (and mean it).
  • Do the time. Depending on the severity of your mistake, there may be some penance involved on your path to forgiveness. Sometimes mistakes can be cleaned up and if that’s the case in your situation, you best get to mopping. Don’t complain. Don’t grumble. Just do it. Everything has it’s limit though, and that includes the statute of limitations on your mistake – you can’t ‘pay’ forever and if after a reasonable amount of time you’ve been unable to make up for your mistake, perhaps it’s time to move on.
  • Go ahead and learn something. No you don’t want to hear it at the time, but every mistake really is a learning experience. People rush. People don’t think. People don’t make the best decisions. Now that you’ve made this mistake, you’ll be more careful next time. You’ll slow down. You’ll think. You’ll make better decisions. I’m here to tell you that if you learned from it, if you will never ever look at yourself in the mirror facing the same disappointment from the same mistake, then you have grown as a person. If you know more now than you knew then, perhaps it’s not disappointment that you feel at all. Perhaps, it’s growing pains.
  • Get.Back.Up. No one died. (Disclaimer: if someone died this is not the blog for you). Maybe some bad things happened. Hell, maybe a whole lotta bad things happened. You can’t fix anything from down there on the ground feeling sorry for yourself. You can’t make anything better if you just stand there, frozen in fear that you might mess up again. Spoiler alert: You’re gonna mess up again. But not like this. No. Never again like this.

In short, shit happens and it’s better to admit you stink and clean that mess up than to walk around acting like you don’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me – I’m going to go take my own advice.

Passion

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There was a time when I thought love was the most powerful emotion one could experience. I still feel this way, that it is truly a force tearing its way through the human race, pulling us apart and pushing us back together at its will. Though, lately, I see love as a delicate and beautiful thing who has a lover herself and his name is passion. Love is steady, a heartbeat of comfort. Passion is what pushes love forward. Passion is what moves people out of their own little worlds. Only when someone is truly passionate about a cause can they become involved. Only when someone is passionate about their work, will they achieve the level of success they wish. Passion is erratic and moves in unexplained patterns, pulling love along for the ride.

I think passion and love are often confused, especially between a man and a womanID-10030452. Love is built over time; again, a steady heartbeat you can set the rhythm of your life to. But passion is something entirely different. Now, I’m not talking about lust. Lust is the immediate desire to intimately know someone; a knee-jerk reaction of a chemical shift in our brains when our prehistoric anatomy finds another to reproduce with. Passion builds on itself, growing and shifting over time the more you know a person. The more you recognize their mind and their desires and how they match your own. Passion can make your body tingle and your mind wander to places you never meant for it to go.

Passion between a man and woman may not always lead to love and it doesn’t have to; he can stand alone confident in his nature and he is strong enough to keep two people bonded together. But by God you cannot love someone without passion. Without passion, love is meek and may or may not be able to sustain itself indefinitely. I love you. What does that even mean if there isn’t any passion to back it up? Nothing. It means nothing. It means we have a life here, we own things together, we have a routine. It doesn’t have anything to do with happiness or satisfaction and if you say you don’t want those things either you’re lying to me or you’ve been lying to yourself for a long time. For your sake, I hope you’re just lying to me.

I have been told that my ability to feel passion is greater than most, and I am inclined to agree. When I want something, when I believe in something, when something moves me…and I mean to my core, I will have it. I will move heaven and earth until they crash together; until the raging fire inside of me has been tamed and only the embers remain, though they threaten to ignite at any moment. I’m often scolded for this in my life, by those around me who in fact lack passion for anything and don’t know how to categorize the emotion when they come across it. I used to feel bad, feel like I was the one who had something wrong with her, but you know what? Fuck that and fuck you. As my granny said, “If you can’t take this heat, baby – get your ass out of my kitchen.”

 

Originally published: 2/1/2013