How to forgive yourself

Oh dear friends, have you ever made a mistake and gotten so mad at yourself and then made the same mistake AGAIN?

It's hard to know what to do with one's self the second time. Let me be specific: Among other things, I'm a translator. This summer I took on a big project, doing a heavy edit, or a re-translation of a 550 page novel by a famous Turkish author. And I did my job lovingly, but towards the end of the summer I lost 1 months worth of work which I had stored Only (wait for it...) on a USB! So i lost the usb key and lost 100 hours of work.
So today I finished redoing everything I'd lost and just as I was about to heave a sigh of relief, you know what happened? I realized there were a few other chapters that i still had to redo!

Oh sadness and banana peels, as one of my favorite cartoon characters used to say! Well, i had a tough morning trying to reconcile myself with this reality but thankfully i talked to Murat, my husband, and he had some sound advice. Just take a break for 2 days, he said. It won't be the end of the world, and you can't keep pushing yourself so hard.

So that's what I will do. I will now go get a haircut and freshen up. Then the world will be mine to reconquer!

P.s.: Strangely enough, it seems we get used to catastrophes like this, in our inner worlds and in the outside world. I mean whatever is shocking and outrageous at first, when it continues to happen you just kinda start accepting it. Which is good because maybe you don't get as mad at yourself but bad because you start accepting political scandals and rude drivers and opportunism and fascism as normal, which means you grt apathetic or cynical.

It's interesting to think about these differences between inner and outer worlds... Maybe I'll continue in my next post. Until then, I leave you with this lovely image of fall on Istanbul streets...