Perhaps one of the lessons my life is trying to give me lately is that I cannot just “go with the flow” anymore, I need to take control of situations to ensure that they work out properly. I have been sitting back, reacting instead of acting, just going along with whatever the people around me were doing and saying and trusting that everything would work itself out. And it doesn’t.
With work, I didn’t pro-actively ask for more responsibilities or let my bosses know I was interested in more challenging work if it meant more pay, and I didn’t go to them to let them know how I felt about communication styles in this office, and so nothing happened. With Jennifer, I exerted basically zero effort one way or the other; I didn’t try to prevent her from cheating on her husband with me and I didn’t try to get her to leave him, I just left it all up to her and hoped that by letting her choose our fate, we would come up with what she wanted. With my father, with working on the house last weekend for example, I agreed to do whatever he told me to do, and I made myself available for the entire weekend, but I didn’t take control of the situation to be sure that things were getting done the way he wanted them to be done, and he certainly doesn’t take control, doesn’t ask for help when he wants it, doesn’t communicate during what times he expects to be working, expects help, and during which times he does not, and apparently, although I followed every direction he gave me (including more than once when he specifically told me to STOP the work I was doing, even though he had nothing else for me to be doing, and the work needed to be done), he was dissatisfied with what got done. Even social situations … I haven’t planned anything or taken steps to help things become more solidly planned, I’ve just gone along with what everyone else was doing, whether they knew what they were doing or not, not double-checking their work, their ideas, not coordinating things properly, and things haven’t been going well. Missing movie showtimes and having to drive back and forth across the city to find another one, miscommunication about which vehicles will be in use or when people will be leaving and returning and on and on, usually just little things, but sometimes problems that suck up whole evenings or cause social problems between friends.