Daily Prompt – March 2, 2026

I like a prompt like this with some teeth to it. I mean sure I could keep it vague and simple by saying the negative experiences in life helped me grow the most. The reality is thats not entirely true for a number of reasons and life is definitely not that simple. I mean if you’ve read my blog at all, you know that I don’t see any experience as truly negative or positive. There’s a ying yang essence to all of life.

Nope, this prompt requires talking about specific experiences I think really impacted my growth as a person. I’m going to do this in chronological order and some of these I’ve touched on before.

The first experience that helped me grow would have been failing out of college the first time. I’ve spoken on this before. I didn’t realize in the moment how much it helped me grow but now looking back I do. It led to really learning about what I enjoyed doing with my life and how to do school the right way for me. Not everything from that experience was positive growth. It created some over achieving perfectionist tendencies when it comes to school. I’m learning to work on those but not succeeding at that attempt taught me about doing things at my pace and because I want to not because I feel I have to. I’ve done so much with my education since because I’ve done it on my schedule not anyone else’s.

The second experience that helped me really grow was my divorce. I suppose you could even go as far as to say my first marriage as whole but I think the divorce more so. It taught me so many things about myself. About who I was at the time versus who I wanted to be. It showed me the power in myself. It was the first time I really stood on my own. I refinanced the house we had bought so I could keep it. I got a job that worked well for me. Not overkill but got me benefits and started me on the path that led me where I am today. It’s hard to separate these events to know if I would have ended up in this job if the divorce hadn’t happened because of the career move I made during the year before the divorce that led me to needing that job when divorced. It also taught me about how I wanted my relationships to work in the future. It showed me that I was smart to set up finances the way I did. It was truly a pivotal moment in my life.

The third and final experience was getting my autism diagnosis. Technically, I am AuDHD but I have known about the ADHD or ADD as they called it when I was a kid for a long time. The autism however was new. It was something I had never really considered until I was doing work in therapy and certain things just kinda clicked and I had a “could I be” moment. I decided to pursue official diagnosis not because it was necessary for anything. Self diagnosis is valid and I wasn’t seeking any work accommodations, this was for validation. Finding out officially validated a lifetime of experiences for me. It has helped me grow in the last couple of years because I now have a better understanding of what I’m experiencing and why. I have the right words for it and I can be more authentic about it. I can honestly say it’s been life altering.