Monthly Archives: May 2012

The Road Less Traveled

It’s the time of year when high schoolers go to prom, when they live out their last moments as seniors and prepare for graduation.

Facebook is filled with prom photos: beautiful dresses, beautiful girls, guys wearing matching tuxes and smiles. So many smiles.

I didn’t have a traditional highschool experience. I stopped attending public school early in my sophomore year and, though I did graduate and receive a high school diploma through my local public school, I did not have the opportunity to experience any of the typical highschool festivities.

All I know of prom is from what I’ve seen on television and in movies. What’s it like to plan out outfits, get all dressed up and spend a night with your friends and classmates dancing? Would I have had fun?

Is prom really like the Prom-asaurus episode on Glee?

I didn’t get to participate in my highschool graduation ceremony either.

The first time I walked across a stage to receive an educational achievement was last summer after I had earned my first college degree. I didn’t feel excited. I felt nervous and overwhelmed with emotion.

Would I have felt differently had I gotten to walk for my high school diploma? Would it have been more exciting?

Even having kids, there’s no good reason why I’ve seen any of these movies…

These are some of the things I think about when I see images of prom and graduation presented. There’s a bittersweet feeling that I missed out.

I also wonder how I will deal with my two daughters as they grow up and enter high school. I am so very unprepared to assist them in typical high school life, including prom and all that goes with it.

It’s so easy to get caught up in these thoughts. In these feelings that I am somehow missing something by not having a traditional high school experience.

If I take a moment and step back from my feelings, I can see that while I may not have traditional highschool experiences to share with my daughters, I have experiences to share with them none the less.

Very little of my life experience has been “traditional.” My experiences differ greatly from the mainstream in ways that expand far before and beyond high school. While this may bring up feelings of “missing out”, in reality I just took a different path than many of my high school classmates.

It doesn’t make my path nor my experiences any better or worse than those of the mainstream. Both are valid paths. I simply took the one less traveled.

Sorrow

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I’m feeling sad today. My first response is always to try to push it away, to keep it at a distance and just try to go on with my day.

You can only push sorrow away for so long though and the longer you do, the more intense it seems to feel.

This quote by Rumi really touches me and helps me realize that while I may not want sadness, it has a purpose.

How I Stopped Being Negative

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Ok. I’ll admit that I haven’t stopped being negative. That’s a bit of an over exaggeration and, frankly, not very realistic.

Instead, “How I Became Less Negative” is probably a more accurate title. Despite semantics, I am less negative than I once was. So, how?

I decided to be less negative

Sounds simple, right? Sounds unrealistic too, I’m sure. I’m not saying that by deciding to be less negative I automatically was. Obviously, that ideology doesn’t fit with reality.

But I made a conscious choice to actively try to be less negative. This involved really looking at how I behave and calling myself out when I notice myself acting in a negative manner (ie. complaining, whining, looking only at the cons and ignoring the pros, acting from a black/white all or nothing point of view and generally being a Debbie Downer.)

♪ You’re enjoying your day, everything’s going your way, when along comes Debbie Downer. Always there to tell you ’bout a new disease, a car accident, or killer bees. You beg her to spare you, ‘Debbie, please!’ but you can’t stop Debbie Downer! ♫

Stop publicly complaining

There’s a difference between stating that “things are hard” or that you are struggling and putting every negative aspect of your life on display without balancing it with the positive. If you want to be less negative, you have to put less negativity out there.

When I initially decided to be less negative I looked at my facebook wall and I noticed that most of my posts were negative, complaining, poor-me-nothing-ever-goes-my-way, everything sucks updates.

I posted nearly every negative thing that happened throughout my day. While I may have felt better to vent these things at the time, later looking back it only justified and proved (my perceived belief of) how shitty my life was. So I tried to stop presenting every perceived “poor me” moment.

Look at and present both the negative and the positive

I also noticed that these negative posts were almost all I posted. From the viewpoint of someone only seeing me through my facebook, nothing positive ever happened to me.

Even if every negative post I made was 100% accurate (and not skewed or exaggerated) my omission of positive updates only fed my cycle of negativity and this was only on facebook! What level of negativity did I present in my actual physical daily life!

Sometimes it isn’t easy for us to see the positives in our life. It’s certainly a lot easier to see the negatives. But only focusing on the negative encourages more negative and presents an inaccurate viewpoint to others and ourselves.

While you don’t want to be Debbie Downer and only see the negative, you also don’t want to ONLY see the positive. Any ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking leads to extremes and a disconnect from reality (I mean, look at her!, she’s YELLOW!)

Even the worst situations have something positive, despite how small it might be.

I don’t want to live in an all or nothing, black or white, negative mindset. Am I always positive and never negative? No. Like seemingly everything else in life, its finding a balance and I choose to try to see both the negative and the positive, with neither weighing greater.

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Focus on Success

Even in the Pain There is Beauty

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