I Believe in a Positive Attitude
As a child I was diagnosed with depression and was not very self aware of this. I never took medication for my depression, thought I was going to therapy because I couldn’t make friends, and by the time I got to junior high I was no longer going to therapy. In fact, I didn’t find out my official diagnosis until I read my medical records just before high school. For most of my teen years I was extremely negative and I had a difficult time staying happy. There were many nights I felt alone and would cry myself to sleep. It wasn’t until my early twenties, when I was diagnosed with a heart condition, that I started to look at the world differently. I decided to find something positive about my situation. I found that I was grateful that, although I had a heart condition, I could still get up and go to work and school. Despite my recent diagnosis, I was still blessed with good health.
This change in my attitude did not make my depression go away, it did not make any difficult situation better. What my attitude change did was make it easier to deal with the difficulties in my life. This “power of positive thinking” can take time and practice to perfect. Even after more than 10 years of this frame of thinking I still struggle at times. There are times I still find it difficult to find something positive, so instead I would find the lesson I learned. There are times when one thing after another happens and the only thing I can do is laugh; this may make me look a little crazy though.
One day, in my mid-twenties, I remember losing my wallet. I had driven from my home in Mesa to Peoria, 45 minutes away, only to discover my wallet was missing. I searched the house and the car, but could not find it anywhere, so I had to order a new driver’s license online. I printed a piece of paper that showed I was a licensed driver; I was to use this until I my new license arrived in the mail. Then on my way home the next day I was pulled over for a taillight being out. The officer asked for my license and registration, so I gave him the paper and started looking for the registration. It just happened that I borrowed my brother’s truck and I could not find the registration in the usual place. I called my dad, since he had been using the truck for work, and he told me a couple of places to look, but it was nowhere to be found. The officer was kind enough to send me off with a warning. At first this all put me in a bad mood, but the more I thought about it the funnier it seemed to me. What were the chances that the same weekend I lost my wallet, I also get pulled over in a borrowed car that does not seem to have the registration in it? All I could do was laugh at the whole situation. I’m pretty sure if someone was with me they would have thought I’d lost my mind, and maybe I had. From that time forward I found myself laughing at my situations more often. I started to find humor instead of letting it get me down.
When people refer to the “power of positive thinking” I now know from experience what they are talking about. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to find something positive. Other times I just have to laugh at myself. But what I believe is if I can find the positive in a situation I know I can handle anything.
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