a) run away
b) try to fix it
The first is not the best of solutions, but sometimes if you avoid dealing with something long enough, it solves itself (or it gets worse and worse until you must deal with it, but at least that process usually makes it clear what you should do). I mostly try not to take this approach these days, because a) it makes me feel like a coward, which is not a way I want to feel and b) it does usually make things much worse before they get better. Things fester. It's better to lance the boil.
The second is more my general approach -- if something seems like a real issue, I try to deal with it. And I keep trying and trying and trying. I'm very persistent. I hate giving up on things. I hate giving up on people. I really hate it when they give up on me, and I usually try to convince them otherwise. I hate admitting something's over. (The way things turned out with _Maiden Voyage_, for example, still grates on me, even though there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.)
Sometimes, you just need to accept things. There are problems and people that you can't do anything about, that you can't change. I have a thyroid disease and will for the rest of my life and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can take supplements to control the symptoms, and that's it. I've mostly accepted that, I think, but I'm used to thinking of myself as a healthy person, and when I find I've forgotten to take the meds for a few days, I sometimes wonder whether I've just forgotten, or if I just don't want to admit that in some very vague and minor way, I'm sick, and will always be.
There are a lot of things that I'm having trouble accepting these days. I want to keep trying to fix them, for the most part (though there are a few that I just want to run away from (and sometimes I oscillate between the two poles)). And most of the problem is that it's often very hard to tell whether something is the sort of thing that can be fixed, or if it should simply be accepted. But I've started having nightmares about some of them, and so I think the avoidance option is really not working very well.
Thank the gods I have a lot of work to do. While I very slowly figure out whether fix or accept is the right answer to various questions, the work is keeping me sane. And now I should get back to it.
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