Limited Edition

Nothing is impossible.
You can be anything you want to be.
If you think you can do it, you can.

Sayings like these make me cringe. I’m sure they’re intended to motivate, but they also imply that those who don’t achieve their dreams, just haven’t tried hard enough. I’d love to figure skate in the Olympics, win the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, and write symphonies that rival Beethoven’s. Age, intellect, and natural abilities say that isn’t going to happen, no matter how hard I try.

It’s not just the big dreams. Things that many people do easily, are simply out of my grasp. Several years of pursuing a foreign language, left me far from fluent. My college roommate, who had only two years of French, spoke it well enough to be accepted into the French dorm in her sophomore year. 

Socially, I do fine with one or two people whom I know well. I don’t mind public speaking and have comfortably addressed a room of five hundred people. Send me to a party with twenty or thirty people I’ve never met, however, and I’ll make the most shrinking wallflower look like an extrovert. 

My grandmother taught me how to sew, knit and embroider. I was a fairly adept student at all of those, but for some reason, tatting eluded me. Despite her patient explanations and hours of practice, my work looked like a bunch of cat-tangled strings. 

My inadequacies seem endless, but I’ll spare you the rest of the list.  I have learned to circumvent my shortcomings. I’ve become adept at dodging social situations that I don’t enjoy. There’s many other ways to meet people and my dearest friends are proof of that. My home boasts no tatted doilies, although my sewing box still holds my grandmother’s tatting shuttle. I smile whenever I see it and remember she loved me, despite my limitations. Afterall, limited editions are valued and rare.