I was turning left, halfway through the crosswalk right by the kids' school, when I noticed that a woman was just inches from my driver's side view mirror.  I recognized her, and recognized that I very nearly killed her.  I opened my window and yelled over the sound of my blood in my ears, tears stinging my eyes and choking me, I'm so sorry.  My widows are all foggy and I didn't see you.  I'm so, so sorry.

And she was okay, and I was okay, but of course we were both shaken up as we silently tallied the list of What Ifs.  I'm not really sure what happened:  if I just didn't look; if she was in my blind spot; if I looked but didn't see because the kids were squabbling or I was preoccupied.  The windows were steamy, and that is probably what happened, but it worries me still that I wasn't paying better attention.

That happens to me a lot.  Not usually while I'm driving, luckily, but just in general.  I feel like I'm often looking up in a panic at some near-miss of a situation, knowing that I fucked up but totally clueless about what it was, exactly, I did.  Or didn't do.  It's like I'm not sure what things to watch, and the things that I don't keep in check circle back on me.  Mainly I have this sense that I am letting people down.  Only no one will really come out and say it, because, you know, I'm going through a hard time right now, and so I'm left feeling that I've been too self-absorbed, or not grateful enough, or too much of a doormat, or maybe just a bad friend, but I'm not sure, really.  Maybe it's all just in my head.  I know that my very own special breed of low self-esteem sometimes flipflops into an assumption that if something is wrong it MUST be my fault.  Which is perhaps about as self-absorbed and egotistical as one human can be. 

What can I say?  I do try.

I'll be better off in a few weeks when I'm not on such a high dose of prednisone.  (It challenges my coping abilities, to put it mildly.)  In the meantime I will weigh my words more carefully, I will watch where I'm going, and I will let myself believe in things that astonish me instead of waiting for that feeling of emptiness where there just was something amazing I was holding on to.