I've decided to visit the past in order to understand the present and build the future. The past I've chosen to visit is my correspondence with someone significant since mid-August 2015 until the present - about 6,000 (saved) email messages to and from her. This week I could reach only mid-October 2015 as quite a few of these messages, whether by myself or by her, made me stop to ponder. While rereading them, I've asked myself constantly how I have changed - unfortunately, in a negative way - and what mistakes I have made since we started corresponding by email between two distant cities (and later under the same roof, then again in two separate places though in the same cities).
It was enough to read the email messages in the first two months of our correspondence to realize what (negative) changes I've undergone since then as the contrast between what I used to be and what I've come to be is simply stunning. I don't know how these changes have occurred, but I've realized that I lost the following important attributes in this chronological order: self-confidence, enthusiasm, and hope, until I found rather recently a new life vision. These changes of mine seem to have brought about the following (negative) changes on her side in this chronological order: hope, enthusiasm, happiness, and confidence, until I threw her into total confusion about life.
I've also realized that I've made some fatal (but hopefully not irreversible) mistakes: decreasing use of written communication to express and exchange our innermost thoughts and feelings, increasing dependence on alcohol to cope with increasing sociocultural and professional frustration and stress, and worsening outbursts of anger under the influence of alcohol. I believe that there is a fundamental difference between mistakes and failures - as long as one can learn some important lesson from these mistakes (and stop repeating them), they are not failures. Actually, I've also realized that one can learn from these mistakes far more than from the so-called success. Yes, I've not only stopped all these negative habits but also learned a couple of very important life lessons.
Now my mission for the future is to restore those positive attributes of mine I seem to have lost, especially self-confidence and enthusiasm. Before I started checking our email correspondence, I thought that enthusiasm might precede self-confidence. But now it seems to be that the opposite is the case. I'll be spending the coming one or two months trying to restore my self-confidence and enthusiasm. I've found a couple of interesting ways to do so and already started implementing them. In parallel I've also started developing compassion not only for others but first and foremost for myself. I have to start my spiritual recovery by approving of myself first. Life is the best school, and its adversities are the best teachers but as long as we know how to "fail forward".
PS: Actually, there is no failure in life in the deepest sense of the word. What is considered "failure" in the conventional sense of the word can be a huge success at the level of our soul.