Double the Devastation and Finally Getting Over It

I – once again – have failed you as a blogger.  It seems to be one of my greatest talents as of late.  And by talent I mean shortcomings.  And by shortcomings I mean ways in which I totally suck at my typical ability to be marginally awesome.  I suck.  I’m sorry.  That’s that.

The truth of the matter is that ever since the “Blog Change Incident of ‘11” things have been different.  Part of me honestly was very, very turned off by the whole situation and that lead me to not even want to blog.  In a way I was almost in mourning.  And as lame that sounds it’s totally the truth.  Eventually though, things got better and I once again found the desire to blog.  I had the desire to connect with all my readers again.  I realized that with or without Hooters I still had a voice and I enjoyed sharing that voice.

And then Hooters Magazine arrived at our store.  Before I even flipped open the first page I was devastated all over again.  I’d never been told the theme of the issue.  I’d never received a deadline.  I’d never even received a reply to the emails I sent enquiring about both.  I knew I wasn’t included and while I understood the reasons, I wasn’t prepared for the way it felt to actually see the magazine in front of me.  I wasn’t ready to not see my column in the table of contents or my name in the credits.  Holding that magazine in my hands made it all very real.

Just like that, I was – once again – devastated.  It wasn’t so much the situation that hurt most, but the way it was handled.  I felt unimportant and dispensable and not worthy of even the slightest consideration.  I felt like a nothing.  All I saw was an opportunity lost.

For a while that’s all I felt; I felt like my one great opportunity had passed me by.  Or more accurately, that my one great opportunity had been taken away from me.  It was an overwhelming feeling.  Yet as overwhelming as it was initially, I slowly began to get over it, step away from the situation and realize that regardless of the outcome the opportunity had still existed.  No matter what.  I had still accomplished something pretty amazing and that said a lot about me as an individual.  Perhaps the real opportunity was realizing the power of my own abilities.

That’s the thing about opportunities, it turns out that not all of them work out perfectly.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that an awful lot of them don’t work out.  But each and every one teaches you something about yourself.  You learn your strengths, weaknesses, likes and dislikes; you learn all the things that will be truly valuable when the next opportunity comes around.  Perhaps the great value isn’t in the opportunity itself, but in the journey it creates.  In that way the real opportunity is internal.

In life people love to talk about their successes, but this situation has shown me that there is also great importance in apparent failures.  Sometimes things just need to not workout so something later will.  And I’m pretty darn excited to see what that later is.

Now I promise not to leave you out of the journey.