Sunday Scribblings: Who Else Can I Still Be?

I love these Sunday Scribblings prompts! I think I'll do this one twice, once as a personal response and once as fiction.

Personal:
I feel like my life goals are the same or similar to what they've always been:

1. be calmer,
   
2. write more,
   
3. have fun.

I wonder: is it a good thing that I'm consistent throughout the years, or does it mean I'm not accomplishing anything? Let's go with the former since my latest goal is to become someone who is gentler on herself. :)

Fiction:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm playing around with POV in a short story I'm working on, trying to decide if it's worthwhile to tell the story from different angles. Here's something from the POV of the father:

Who else can I still be, you ask? Lots of things. At first, after my wife's death, I thougth I couldn't be anything. I thought I'd just live quietly, avoiding thinking about the fact that the bitch was cheating on me. (I hate to think of my late wife like that--as a bitch or as a cheater. But I know that the latter, at least, is true.) And then Susan, my daughter--my too smart for her own good daughter--had to nose around and discover June's affair. Once someone else knew, I couldn't be quiet anymore.
First, brandy started disappearing from my liquor cabinet and landing in my belly at an alarming rate. Then I started skipping days at work. I'm a professor, and it's summer, so it's not like any one would notice if most of us took off for a few days. But I work all summer, all day. That's why my secretary came looking for me at my house on her lunchbreak when I didn't show up or return her calls for two days in the week after Susan left.
Until she showed up in my living room, I never thought of Patty as a real person. She was a good secretary--dependable, smart. I didn't know much about her personal life, other than the fact that she was a single mom to a 12 year old boy. But that day I learned an awful lot about Patty, an awful lot. And since then I've learned a lot about lots of women. More than I ever had before. The only one I'm sorry for is Torrey, a former student who came by to say hello. Yes, she's old enough to not get me in legal trouble, but I should've known better. But god, to see that young skin again! And to realize how little I appreciated it when I had young skin of my own.
So who can I be? I can be anyone. I've got a get out of jail free card--a dead, cheating wife-- that allows me to get away with just about anything, at least for a little while.