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Learning from my mistakes

A lot of my really good learning has come from my dumbest mistakes.

 Two examples:

 Once I had a friend who got really really sick and was homebound for a long time. At first people would visit her and stuff, but as her illness wore on for months and months, she kind of slipped off everyone's radar. Everyone was overjoyed when she was finally well enough, though pale and unhealthily slender and weak, to rejoin society. I don't know how I failed to realize until a year or two later that that period of her life had generated a profound loneliness in her, and had even caused her to become depressed. Now I try to check up on my friends who are sick and keep tabs on them. I don't want them to ever feel like they're forgotten or alone.

 Two men taught me that it's important to communicate clearly in relationships of any kind. Let's put it this way: I didn't realize my communication wasn't getting across to them. (By the way, these two instances weren't simultaneous.) Because of my failure to communicate clearly, some very painful, awkward, embarrassing and unpleasant situations arose, for both parties. For this reason, I'm trying really hard to communicate clearly with the people around me from now on. I don't want that to have to happen again and be responsible for it. I'm not as concerned about myself as I am about the fact that I'd be causing an innocent human being unnecessary pain.
I'm not trying to brag or anything like that, I just wanted to point out, you see me as a sum total of everything I've learned and been through, but you didn't see that development. You think I'm *this* great, but I only got this good because I made a lot of dumb mistakes along the way. And dumb mistakes are okay, as long as you learn from them. 
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