A friend has two daughters in elementary school. One of them loves to revisit her earlier childhood — pictures she drew, early attempts at spelling, and photos of herself. She has said that she wishes to go back and be a baby again “so I can see how cute I was and how much everyone loved me.”

The other sister, however, feels uncomfortable with her former self. Her past work makes her cringe. “I was so stupid,” she says, laughing and rolling her eyes.

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You can choose to be mad at your parents or school for not teaching you things that you feel are necessary for your growth and success as a human being.

However, the fact is that there is so much to know and so much to learn — and some of it may change or become irrelevant based on what happens in the world or even as a result of our own choices. Our parents and teachers did the best they could, and it’s up to us to figure out the rest.

So now I’d like to share ten things that may be obvious to you but were not obvious to me until I saw them. Maybe you’ll laugh at me — or maybe something I say will be useful. Here goes.

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When I was a kid, I was just in awe of professional musicians. How do you get up on stage and play song after song and not mess up?

Well, I’m still in awe of professional musicians, but now I understand something fundamental: Most of the time, whatever they’re doing up there is as easy as driving around town or carrying on a conversation.

It takes a degree of effort and concentration, but it’s within the range of routine activities. They’re not pushing themselves so hard that they’re risking a train wreck in front of hundreds or thousands of people. They’re doing something that they can already reliably do.

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There were a number of years where I dreaded opening my email inbox.

I just never knew who was going to have a problem that was my fault.

The fear went away — but the emails demanding my attention didn’t. There is almost always someone upset with me now, and I’ve learned to live with it.

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After spending most of the last quarter of last year making a dining-room table-full of holiday gifts, I decided that I wanted to knit some things for myself.

I made a shawl and a hat and some fingerless mitts; a cape and a couple pairs of leg-warmers. But what I really wanted to make was a sweater.

And then I spent hours combing Ravelry (a website for knitters and crocheters) for juuuust the right one. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, so I considered designing my own.

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The stories we tell ourselves can help us our hurt us. The ways in which we measure ourselves can reinforce the awful story or help us to build a new one.

We keep the awful stories out of habit. There’s something comforting about clinging to the story that reinforces what we’ve always believed, even when it makes us feel terrible.

A story like, “I keep thinking I’ll be good at things, but I’m always bad at them.”

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