“If you can’t find happiness in the ugliness you’re not going to find it in the beauty either,” Joanna Gaines.  This is the epitome of perspective and how we choose to look at life.  We can either be the only one who has ever dealt with anything like we’ve experienced and no one can relate or we can accept that we are on a similar continuum.  We need to be able to manage how we see things and how we react to them.  We need to understand the power we have over how we interpret things because until we assume responsibility for our thoughts and actions, someone else will always have the power to determine how we feel and what we do with our lives.  We have to choose to see the good in everything or at least make an effort to understand that, while certain things may be rough, while we wouldn’t consciously choose them for ourselves, there is a reason for it.  And even if we don’t understand the reason, even if we never understand it, we still learn how to move forward with it as it is. 

I know the mental strength it takes to see the good in every situation, it can feel like dragging the weight of a mountain with us.  But witnessing the things I have over the past several years, the culmination of many of them in this year, has shown me with 100% certainty that we will never move onto something good if we choose to see the bad.  I’ve seen my family trying to manage things on their own because we are too proud/scared to reach out for help when we feel like we are drowning, like somehow we got ourselves in to this situation so it’s up to us alone to get out.  The brain will always try to reconcile what has happened, it will try to logic how we got here and who did what, who is responsible.  The brain is in survival so it’s looking for the guilty/responsible party for where we are and why we feel the way we do.  The truth is that all comes from within.  It’s all on us—and we can break the patterns that didn’t belong to us.   

To play off of yesterday’s topic, that broken bone will heal and while it may be different than someone else’s it doesn’t mean that they don’t know the pain of a broken bone.  Stop trying to make ourselves worse off than everyone else and trying to be the victim—we don’t need attention from the negative and we don’t need to highlight anything that causes us pain.  I’ve also learned that if I break a bone in the process of trying to do something unique and I failed, it doesn’t mean that I have to bear the weight of it on my own.  I can still have people help me put myself back together and continue on my work.  We can use that pain and turn it into something productive.  If we can’t see the light in our darkest times then we won’t appreciate it when it gets brighter.  It can suck being in the dark, looking at the ugly, so if we can appreciate at least being alive with it, the chance to create something new, then we can start seeing the beauty around us—and appreciate the beauty we create.