Today is my second day lying in bed with my throat on fire and my head aching from the long hours of rest (ironic isn't it?). The doctor diagnosed me with Strept Throat. I heard about it from my daughter's day care but i didn't know how painful it can be.
To kill some time and to keep myself busy i have been listening to an audiobook called "Can't hurt me" by David Goggins. The amount of pain this person had to endure in his childhood is crazy, but not even close to the amount of pain he decided to put himself through in adulthood, with the only purpose of discovering himself.
Nowadays "self discovery" is a buzz word, I hear it at least once a day while listening to podcasts, I even used it as subtitle for my blog! Granted, i listen to a lot of podcasts so that increases my exposure to it but nonetheless i think we can all agree that we have become more and more aware of the need to know ourselves.
So, this morning i spent some time thinking about the things that i messed up in my life and i decided i would start taking accountability for each and every one of them.
Looking back at my life i realized my attitude has been a constant dance between accountability and blame shifting. The blame shifting started early on, being the 3rd of 4 sisters it was quite easy for me to point fingers around the room and find someone who could be equally guilty of doing what i did, so i kept playing that game as much as i could. My mom tried her best to break the omerta' in our pack but most of the times she would have to give up because outnumbered. So i kept blame shifting and pushing away responsibilities as i could.
Of course this behavior was not chronic to the point that put me in trouble in life but it certainly set me up for many failures.
In January 2011 a new year had started and with that also the countdown for my project. My return flight to Italy was on February 28th and i still had almost nothing in my hands. The task the Professor gave me in McGill was way out of my reach but i had no clue that was the issue until i made it back to mother land and presented the work to my own Professor. He looked at the project statement and said that it was practically impossible to solve that problem within 6 months and he said that was a perfect assignment for a PHD. Many questions popped into my mind, first of which was "why didn't you give a better look at it when i sent it to you in September?" but i also had other questions like "Could have someone else done it? Was i too weak or not enough determined to find a solution to my problem?". A deep feeling of failure pervaded me for months..it was the first time after years that i failed. Hard work and discipline had made me one of the top students in my school and that was the reason why i got the opportunity to be sent to McGill. But now, in the face of failure, none of my previous achievements seemed to matter. Was i blame shifting? Maybe...i've thought about this event for years. I still think of it today. Maybe someone else would have found a way to get the project done within the 6 months but i certainly wasn't able to. I tried everything i could and everything i knew and when i realized that working on my own was bringing me nowhere i decided to venture out and seek for help in the lab.
That's when V. got into the picture. By that time, my confidence was already pretty low..i had realized i was not even close to the end of the project and when i asked for help he told me i should have reached out to him earlier and told me that's how everybody gets stuff accomplished in the lab, by using other people's knowledge and help. Never before i had used that strategy, i was more for the "do your hard work alone and reach out to others once the job is almost done, just to solve the last doubts". So, no need to say i felt like i got it completely wrong.
As we started to hang out more, i started to notice he had a great charm. He seemed a very classy person, very sensitive and very calm.
Two weeks after seeing him every day i was completely in love with him. I had lost any rationality and all that i wanted to do was to come back and see where this relationship would bring us.
Some people say there is a path already designed for us, and that might be very true because the only obstacle for me to be back in Montreal were the money for my return ticket. I had used my dad's credit card the entire time i was there and now i was NOT going to pay $700 for a flight ticket just to see how a new relationship would go. But destiny bent the odds for us and while searching on Air Transat's website, much with my surprise, i found a ticket Rome to Montreal at $188 CAD. I couldn't believe it, it was the single one thing i needed to give my new life a shot and the Universe had responded by sending me an offer i couldn't refuse.