What are you glad you did?

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I am glad for . . .

. . . graduating high school.

. . . graduating college.

. . . owing nothing to any relative for college tuition.

. . . being divorced from my 1st wife.

. . . volunteering for military service.

. . . earning an Honorable Discharge from military service.

. . . marrying my 2nd wife.

. . . all our children being healthy and law-abiding citizens.

I'm glad I became a musician. It opened a lot of social doors for me and when I'm feeling down it nearly always sets my mood right if I start work on a new song, either practising it with a view to performing it, or recording it. There have been times when making a new recording has been pretty much the only thing in my life that has "made sense" to me.

I'm glad I pushed myself into passing the more important exams at school. The result was that I was able to get a reasonably cushy job that paid enough for me to live on and have a bit over for fun things. Not that I was very brave about preparing for the exams. I was just scared of failing, incurring my parents' wrath, and ending up with a crappy job at the bottom of the pile.

I'm glad I spent a few years among hippies, anarchists, and assorted counter-culture types of people. I really felt accepted and liked, and it made me realise that there were people who wouldn't judge me by silly mainstream values. I was usually among people but I rarely felt awkward or anxious. Mind you it was more accident than design, though I'd always been attracted to those oddball personalities. I quit a band I was in because I couldn't stand the drummer's awkward behaviour, then an eccentric bass player who had always admired my band invited me to join his band. Around the same time my marriage was breaking up and I happened to mention I needed to find somewhere to live, and he said I could move into the shared house he was living in, which was part of a whole district full of friendly alternativist types.

I'm glad I became a somewhat cynical, practical thinker. It's probably kept me out of a lot of trouble and I've been able to solve most of the problems that life has confronted me with.

I'm glad I listened to the advice of counsellors when they pointed me towards examining feelings. It took me a while and I'm probably still not all that good at it, but it's helped me to understand myself and relate to others better.

I'm glad I figured out that if a given person isn't a real threat to me, it's silly to give them a bad time or defend myself against them.

I'm glad I came over to the view that there wasn't much point in worrying about my "value" as a person. My self-esteem will probably always be brittle and it'll bother me when it seems to be crumbling, but at least I know it's meaningless.

I'm glad I took on board the notion that success is simply how happy you can make yourself and that it has little to do (at least in my case) with careerism, competition or fame, or any of the other token symbols of success that are so widely regarded as the real thing.

I'm glad I adopted a fairly healthy lifestyle.

I got lucky when I obtained my civil service job when I was 19. I almost didn't go to the interview for it!

I am glad I graduated with a bachelor's with honors from a state university.I am glad I graduated from a public high school in Texas.I am glad that I bought a half ton pickup.

I'm glad I got my education at the library, focussed on my interests, and beat much better funded university teams in technical competitions. I'm glad that I can fix most things myself, so I can live very cheaply. I have worn out dozens of bicycle tires, and now that I need a car, it costs me under $200 pa for parts and depreciation on reliable and economical ways to ignore fashion. I'm glad I use exercise and nutrition to maintain my health instead of trying to patch it up with drugs.
I'm glad I don't have things on my conscience, or buried away from it. I'm glad I met quite a few unusual people, and had some unlikely coincidences leading to new phases of my life. I didn't like the upheavals, but overall, it beat staying in a rut.

Ride a horse

I've accomplished more than this but I'm glad I ran to love all those years ago because despite what they tell you;

All you need is love, or to hold on to the idea of love and/or love yourself and it will make everything make more sense.

I guess that I forgot about that but I guess another thing I accomplished is...

I eventuallly remembered again.

Last edited by Sarahsmith on 21 May 2022, 9:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So I mean the other things I'm glad I accomplished are:

I'm glad I got away from my mother.

I'm glad I got an apartment when people here said it was hopeless.

I'm glad I traveled a little even if it wasn't that far from home. At least to other provinces.

That I wrote a lot and did some art.

Learned to cook.

I got therapy to learn how to have healthy self assertive communication instead of "fawning", and I learned how to say no, learned how to make healthier choices and how to recognize being manipulated, abused and intimidated. Therapy saved my life and sanity 40 years before I ever knew about my autism, but I am also very glad that I finally learned I am autistic in my late 60s. Two life changing events. Don't be afraid to try therapy, it can be life saving. I would have been dead in a gutter long ago if I had not learned healthy communication techniques.

I had a job making a model sailing ship as the center piece of a parade float. The boss wanted three masts, and two or three square sails on each, furled. He was expecting plain sticks for the masts, but I knew that each course of sails had its own mast section on a real ship, we were in a port city, and it just wouldn't look right to me if I hadn't spent a few extra hours building sections and steps.

At my first "real" job, I was using a stamping machine to put terminals on wires for toys. Nobody else seemed to care if the wire insulation ended in the gap where it belonged and thought I was slow, but I wouldn't do it sloppy.

I can see a valid practical argument in favour of going for 90% of the quality for 10% of the labour time (or some other such attractive percentages), but it's questionable whether people have such good control over the art of corner-cutting. It's very task-specific and can take a lot of careful thought to figure out what can be disregarded without doing more harm than good. For me it's an emotional thing as well. I get a lot out of knowing I've gone the extra mile with a task and created an excellent result, and I dislike seeing sloppy work.

So I was a good fit in my science job, as a rule, because science usually demands a lot of rigorous attention to detail. But even there I saw some travesties. They had a DNA sequencing service where they'd always get the client to tell them what results they were expecting, and they'd modify the report accordingly. Rigorous science doesn't do that, it would simply report the sequence as the procedure said it was, accepting the fact that there were gaps. A second report after plugging in the client's expectations, suitably labelled as of lower reliability, would be of value, but it always seemed rather dodgy to me to just give out that one report with no such admission of the "fudging" and no record of how the stated results had been adjusted.

One of the best decisions that I ever made was to take a non conventional approach to finding a bride and getting married. Most people meet someone and go on dates and after awhile propose and get married. I tried that but was totally non successful. So I decided to throw the conventional approach in the garbage can and try something different.

I started by making a list of what I wanted in my wife. It was a very crazy list but it was WHAT I WANTED.

Then I began to look for a way to find such a girl. I threw everything conventional out the window. In the end, I traveled to the other side of the world and after 6 weeks, I proposed to her and she accepted. It took me a year to bring her back to the U.S. due to bureaucratic red tape. But in the end, I managed to bring her and then marry her. We have been married over 45 years and she was a wonderful wife and mother to my wonderful children when then grew up and had wonderful families of their own.

I was on a committee, and someone proposed that we buy a big sign she had designed. Unfortunately, the background and font colours would have shown up as the same grey in a B&W photo. I'm glad that I didn't rant about this idiot violating the first principle of typography, and instead pretended that I was just worried about colour-blind people being able to read it.

What I have in mind for a topic here is not plain bragging, but incidents where being an aspie let me do usuful, but unusual things. When I was learning to work as an electrician, I was confused by the way our two systems were described. Three-phase power made sense, for three voltages going up and down like three hammers pounding one stake, which is used for heavy machinery. However, common house wiring was described as single phase, even though you can get two different voltages according to how it is hooked up. I got tired of reading different books, and just went to the office tower of our electric company. I looked for the "engineering" floor, took the elevator there, and asked the first guy I found if the power could be more accurately called "two-phase." He agreed, and I had no more trouble.

I’m glad I learned to paddle wild rivers. I learned white water so I could get away from people. It has worked for me. I just spent six days on a river in preparation for a three week trip.

Not sure if that was what you had in mind, Dear_one. But it’s what comes to mind now.