I try so hard but...

I have had many blogs in the past and they have all done very well. This time I am going at this completely different. I want to be anonymous. I have always given a pretty good background on myself and my family and everything that is going on in my life. This time I think I am going to just start right where I am. I don't want to mislead anyone but the information in my profile isn't even about me. A friend of mine help me set this up because I do want to remain anonymous and I think it is important to put this in my first posting.

Over the last couple of years I have had so many challenges. I have faced so many different obstacles in my life that I had choices to make that I could have easily chosen one of two routes. Either take the route of life has really handed me a bag of crap and I want to just roll in it and be miserable and make everyone around me that way to. Or the other option of I am going to try to make the best of my situation and keep a positive outlook on life. I try very hard to choose option 2. I am not perfect and there have been times when my first reaction was to get very upset and disappointed. When I realized that it wasn't getting me anywhere I picked myself up and changed my attitude and attempted the 2nd option. After a while it became a little easier to accept the fact that life is just going to come with a ton of crap and dealing with it like an adult is the best way to go.

Like I said earlier, my age in my profile is not accurate but I promise you I am definitely into adulthood by more than a few years. I am not a senior citizen that should know better about these things but I feel like I am trying to catch on and get the hang of doing things the right way before life is passing me by and I look back and say "Wow I wasted a lot of valuable time".

I have recently reconnected with a family member in my life that I have not always gotten along with too well and if I do say so myself it took some pride swallowing on my part to make the phone call to initiate what is happening. Since we started connecting tho other relationships around me have started to improve. Things were going really well and I felt like I had gotten myself on the right track. I had a really great unexpected phone call with Jane (we will call her Jane) just a few days ago. I sat down and sent her an email telling her how much I appreciated her kind words and that I was so glad our relationship was improving. I really put time and thought into this email and after I sent it I felt like I had told her things I had needed to tell her for years. Good things that my pride would never let me admit to her for years.

A few days later I received an email in return. It started off thanking me for the email but then continued to say things like I held grudges and that I needed to be more forgiving. I needed to work on this because it is things that I would want from others. This really puzzled me. I had not said one thing in the entire email that would possibly provoke a response like this. I let my spouse read the response and he was just as shocked as I was. I am always feeling like I AM ALWAYS FEELING LIKE I TRY SO HARD BUT IT IS NEVER ENOUGH....

If a person is one way and then changes for the better, and it is not a temporary change, like you see it for a long time in them, when do they deserve the credit for the change? When is it enough?