How do you learn from your own mistakes?

There is a lot of hardwiring that keeps us from altering pathological behaviors, even when we're conscious of engaging in these kinds of acts.

So unfortunately, all that I can say is that the only way to learn from mistakes is to make them over and over.

Only two people Ive known ever said it was "an issue", and I know this cause I've asked other friends/partners in some panicked attempt to figure out if I really was an alcoholic! They all say "youre no worse than the rest of us whats the deal?" so its hard to make a judgement call. I know I have no self control, I know thats the big issue.

I've been viciously aware of this for a while now (12 months or more I think) and it isn't easy, but I'm trying! :-/ One day at a time and all that...

this is a big fear I guess. That something awful (as if whats already happened isnt bad enough) will have to happen. I don't really even want to think about that.

My closest thing to an anecdote is that I used to suck at relationships. That's not entirely true, but it's the easiest way to sum it up: I was no good at balancing between relationship, work (that is, writing; school, job, didn't count -- I can sacrifice time and attention from those without caring), and whatever my own needs at the time were (generally, "growing up" -- in my first relationship, I think I pretty much stayed 18 for three years because I was too busy doing shit to actually grow from the shit I was doing).

When my second engagement ended after almost four years, I realized I was at a standstill with writing, school, and my own personal bullshit as well -- I'd respectively: fallen into that rut of tinkering with the same stories over and over but never finishing them, reworking old ideas instead of coming up with new ones and pushing myself; gotten hung up in a program I thought I was emotionally invested in but actually wasn't getting any satisfaction from; and fallen into cycles of behavior I kept blaming on external things even though the behavior was the same no matter what the excuse was. The relationship would have ended no matter what -- but it ended when it did, and the way it did, because I was spreading myself too thin between treading water in four different ponds and not making any progress in any of them.

My first relationship had ended exactly the same, only more painfully and less healthily -- but I had been in the same position of having no idea what I wanted to do with my life over the short-term, and having no real investment in anything (I've mentioned having gone to Hampshire; this is when I dropped out). So I figured, okay, that's a crappy three-to-four year cycle to fall into. Let's fix that fucker.

At first I thought that the problem was that when I was in a relationship, I put other things aside, and so I should take time off from even the possibility of a relationship and get those other things tended to. I decided not to date for the rest of the year (this was in a March) -- not just no serious relationship, but no dinner-and-a-movie, no one-night stand, nothing. Fix my shit before inflicting it on anyone else.

I got my shit about half-fixed before I realized what a half-assed idea that was, and spent the next year after that focusing on what I should've learned ages ago: how to do that balancing act, how to be in a relationship without either neglecting things outside it or investing in them at the expense of the relationship. How to write regardless of mood and the content of the day-to-day bullshit -- how to keep my day-to-day life out of my writing. How to focus selfishness so that I could take care of myself in whatever ways I needed to without actually doing so at the expense of other people.

All in all, I think I'm lucky to have figured that shit out in two years -- being in graduate school and having thesis hours to burn helped :) None of it is especially helpful to you, because it's not like I can say "well, I turned the rheostat of my arrogance down from obnoxious to simply charming." It's all internal, and a lot of it came down not to telling myself to stop doing things, but asking myself why I did those things -- or why I felt certain ways -- and moving in a different direction.

Of course, I had an easy hook, too -- writing (I feel like I bring up writing in nearly every post here that isn't a one-liner. I'm nearly always writing in another window when I read ILX.) I could set an easily-imagined goal by saying, "Okay, I want to write XYZ. What kind of guy would write XYZ?" "Well, that guy would." "Right. I'd better be that guy, then." It's just a mental trick -- maybe like those visualization exercises they used to have us do in grade school -- but at the time, I did say I was learning to be the guy who could write the stories I wanted to write.

(And it worked; I decided not to submit anything for publication during that learning period, and since "fixing" things, my resume has been rapidly bulking up, while still leaving me time for a girlfriend, friends, and two demanding cats.)