Caitlin V

In my partnership, if it is me versus them, we've both lost.

So if I'm on this person's team and we are working together against something that we have identified to be a problem for both of us, then it is not up for me to destroy them.

That is not how either of us is gonna get out of this better.

And so I had to like,

So the hour that I spend driving to the garden is undoing all of those things in my mind and saying, OK, we don't have to go there.

I don't have to go there.

Assuming the best intent, you know, he probably didn't mean to do what I think he did.

And therefore, I don't need to attack and I don't need to defend.

And and also there's this big softening that happens, I think, also just as a consequence of growing older because we get smoothed out.

All of the relationships, whether they like succeeded because we stayed together long enough to die, which is a pretty tough definition of success, or the relationships that like have come and gone with ease.

Like I see myself personally as like a stone that's just been tumbled and tumbled and tumbled and is getting smoother and smoother all of the time until I have like a smooth, glossy exterior that like is easier for me to let go of things.

To say, you know what, like maybe I am the person who,

should have behaved differently.

Maybe the thing that I did was what escalated that or what led to that additional conflict or maybe I didn't communicate myself clearly and therefore they had incomplete information and it wasn't that they were trying to hurt me, it was that that's all that they could operate with.

And here's the other thing, I have a lot of support.

I have a network of friends who I know I can pick up the phone and they will answer and I can say, hey, can I just work out this situation with you?

He said this thing to me, it brought up that for me and here's what I'm thinking now.

And they can hold that perspective.

They can gas me up if that's what I need.

They can come at it from my partner's perspective and add, you know, like, well, if I were him, here's how I would be thinking about it.