Jay Michaelson @Jmm

I would change my lack of courage that has and still is preventing me from living my dream.

I can't help but also mention one more thing that I would change about myself. My fear of regret.

I have to mention this because I feel that my lack of courage and my fear of regret go hand in hand.

I lack the courage to do what I feel is correct because I feel an enormous sense of fear, a fear of regret. When I think about what consequences decisions will have on my life and others, specifically, what I am letting go of and what others are losing, I can't help but fear the regret that I could feel later on down the road if I ever decide that what I chose was wrong and that I want what I had back. Because, I may not be able to get it back, and if I did, it probably won't be the same as it was.

I lack the courage to get past this fear, I lack the courage to accept my possible regret because there will be regret in any big choice we make, any life-changing choice will eventually lead us down a road that will have at least some amount of regret. How much? We don't know. When? We don't know that either. But the road is not only filled with regret, not if the choice we made is truly what we want in life.
This is what I believe, though, I understand it's easier said than done, hence why I would change this about myself because I have not yet found a way to do it. It is a work in progress.

I believe in more than just second chances.

Every person is fighting their own battle, everyone was raised differently, and everyone will make a mistake at some point, especially with other people in their life, i believe this is unavoidable. But it is up to us to allow these people and ourselves to learn from those mistakes and to grow from them, if we don't give someone another chance, we are limiting how much they, and we, can learn and grow from those mistakes.
If someone doesn't take that new chance you offer them and learn from it, then that is on them, not you, you offered them the chance to learn and grow.

I never rule someone or something out, at least i try not to.
If someone does something that hurts the trust between us, they always have a chance to gain my trust again, but i will know to be more cautious with them in the future.

Trust for me is a difficult thing, but i believe that i am also a very forgiving person, so while i may eventually trust a person again, that trust may not be the same as it used to be. It may be a weaker trust, and it may be a different kind of trust, a more selective trust.

Of course, each case and situation is its own, each person is different, so the amount of trust i put in each person will be different, the amount of trust i will put back in people in the second, third and so on chance will be different based on that person and case.

I do think that in the end, if someone continues to do things that eventually hurt me, any additional chances i will give will be much smaller than the others. Meaning, i won't be mad, i won't hold a grudge, i will be ok with that person, nothing more. So the extra chance would be a chance to still be ok with me, but it won't be a chance to be what we were before.

Its great to give more chances and i think people deserve more than one chance, but at some point you have to understand and accept the reality of things, and that maybe what you had until now was not right for you, and that the next chance does exist, but is just different from the past ones.

Their intentions. Even though people may end up doing things that I find wrong, bad, mean, insulting, inappropriate, I always find it important to listen to the persons intentions, it can change the whole picture.

This is for sure not a free pass to do anything and all will be forgiven, but, at the minimum, I think its important to understand what the intention of a person is, and where they are coming from - not location wise, but what have they been through.

If someone comes up to me angry and upset and lets it out on me, most likely It wasn't me who caused that anger, so instead of retaliating and getting angry at them also, I find it much more helpful to try and understand where this person is coming from, what happened to the person and what is causing them so much anger.

Just because someone is angry at you, doesn't mean they are angry with you, they could just be letting it out and you happened to be in that place at that time.

Just because someone did something wrong in your eyes doesn't mean that that was their intention, you don't know what that person has been through..

I want to live and to build a house in a forest.

I'm not sure when this dream actually developed, but since it did, it has not left me for years.
There is something that attracts me about just being in a forest. There is a certain peace in the loneliness of the woods, of nature.

The calmness I feel when I am alone in a forest is not something that I have ever been able to replicate anywhere else.
My mind is clear in the forest, when I think, I think mindfully, I think deeply and peacefully.
I am able to understand things that I could not understand before, my thought process is just on a whole other level when I am in a forest, just walking or being in it.
My mind flows calmly.

To be able to live in nature, to be able to build a house for myself to live in, feels to me like building a whole world, my whole world.
Just the thought of this makes me feel more at home than I feel almost anywhere else.

This has become much more than just a dream, it has become my life goal.

Some people would say that living in a forest, especially alone, would drive them insane. I believe we all are insane to some degree, I believe that living in society has corrupted our minds, at least it has mine, and my cleansing, my healing, would be my loneliness in the forest.

This doesn't mean that I seek to always be alone for the rest of my life in a forest.
I do see a family, I do see friends and a community joining. In what way though, I am not sure. For now, all I can think about when I think about this is the quietness of the tress and how peaceful my life would be among with them.

When I feel pressure and general uncertainty about life.

It happens quite often honestly, and these two reasons usually go hand in hand with me. My uncertainty about life causes me a lot of pressure, and this pressure I feel, and the uncertainty, also come from external sources, such as family.

There is a general notion that one must know what they are doing with their life, that they should have a big picture, a goal, but even more than that, a plan, one that is laid out in front of them.

I am not like this, but a lot of people in my life are, and unfortunately their will for this kind of life many times puts me in a situation where I start to question myself about these things as well. What am I doing with my life? Where am I going? And for what reasons?

The moment I start asking myself these questions I start feeling an overwhelming sense of pressure, and this makes me want to escape from it. It makes me feel the need to get away from it.

People consider this running away. I disagree.

What I am doing is very simple, I am understanding things in my own way, in the way that best suits me, not others.

For others, talking and sharing with others helps understanding things, it helps them be calmer and to release a little bit of the pressure. For me, this does not work.

I found what works for me, and that is being alone. It could be for a few hours or a few days. However long, when I'm alone I feel a great sense of freedom, I feel relieved from the stress of life. This is especially true when I go into nature.

Just walking around in nature releases me from all of the negative thoughts and the stress I face, instead of these negative and consuming feelings, I am actually able to understand myself and what I am feeling, I am able to put the stress aside and think only about the issue.

This is my greatest cure for stress and situations in life where I just don't have an answer for what's next, or when I just don't feel myself.

Many things actually.

A big one is building up my personality, being on the outside the person I wish to be on the inside.
I don't think I was able to do this very well, I think I may not know how.
It may be that the person I want to be just isn't me, but I will continue trying because at the moment, I cant say that I feel at home in my own skin or in my own mind.
The person I want to be will.

Another thing is traveling. I wish I could have done more traveling, I always wanted to live a life of traveling around the world but never did. I may not even like that kind of life, if I would have been able to do it 5 years ago, I would know if its even the kind of life I want instead of always dreaming about it.
What if I actually do it and find out its not what I want? What would I have given up for it only to find out that I don't want it?

They say the things we regret the most are the things we didn't do, this is especially true for me.

The list can go on, but, ill add just another one:

Courage.
I wish I would have built up more courage, I think it may be the main thing that holds me back in life. I lack the courage to do what I feel is right, to do what I want to do. I wish I would have understood this 5 years ago and worked on improving it then. I don't know if it would have made a difference today, but at least I would know that I tried.

The bigger things and the little things.

I try to live my life as a minimalist, I like having very few things, and when ever I make the decision to get rid of something that I clearly am not using nor will I, but rather I was just holding on to it because I wasn't ready to let it go, I get a great sense of accomplishment.
Because I managed to do something that I believed in, even though it wasn't the easiest thing to do.

In my work, when I finish a project that I really invested my time and energy in, I also feel accomplished. Though, this does usually happen mainly with my personal work rather than my actual day job, since my personal work is far closer to me and, well, more personal. The feeling of accomplishment is much greater.

So really its the things that I succeed in and that are close to me that give me the feeling of being accomplished.

In a way yes, but maybe in a bigger, more realistic way, no.

I think that from a young age I knew what I wanted from life, and that was freedom, but, I understood that at some point, I will have to find a job.
This truth was undoubtable, but, I did not accept it for myself, instead, I came up with the idea of learning programming so that I could be able to build my own work, my own project, something that I would be able to make a living from. This was my way out of the normal 9-5 career life, this was my way out of spending most of my waking hours in an office working for someone else company.
So I started learning from a young age how to program, for that goal, for the goal of freedom.

What I wanted to do with that freedom was to travel the world, to go to and see places I could only dream of or see in movies. To see cultures, people, to have experiences that I couldn't have while living the normal career life.

At some point, I did find a job as a programmer, so I can say that I am working in the field I wanted to, but other than that, no, I am not doing now what I always wanted to do growing up, unfortunately.

Without meaning to, I put the whole dream life on hold and remained living this career life, the exact thing I was trying to avoid.

I am working on "freeing" myself from it, and I'm sure that sooner or later (probably sooner) I will be free and I will actually live the life I wanted to since I was a kid.