Thursday 7 April 2011

vii Going Against the grain

I am a massive pessimist. Sadly this is also literally true. Haha not really.

I am chronically depressive and so I realised it is important to try to look at things with a more positive attitude, something which I endlessly admire Ellie for. I am quite ashamed that I am such a pessimist since I find it annoyingly ungrateful, but the fact is that depression is a chronic disease not a character trait and appears in all parts of life and personality in a variety of forms, just as a persistent illness does. It’s a multi faceted attack and I have to constantly fight against it. Anyway, I don’t like talking about my depression since a lot of people don’t know I have it so let’s just leave it there and hope that like 90% of my blogs, nobody will read this.

See? I just can’t stop being pessimistic!

Today I have been trying to say or think one positive thing for every negative thing I say or think. It is so uncomfortable and feels extremely false. But I want to stick with it and see how it goes.

Here are the negatives (how sick is it that I am actually looking forward to listing these?) with positives in italics:

  1. The brother of the baby I babysit for had a high fever (41 Celsius) and projectile vomited all over the floor.
    • The baby itself hardly cried and was happy to walk around with me for over an hour, and we invented a game where he throws flowers on the ground and waves bye-bye to them. This isn’t as cute as you would think but at least he smiled a little.
  2. The lady I babysit for couldn’t pay me today so will pay me tomorrow.
    • I trust her to do this and she seems very friendly so far.
  3. The glass dome covering my watch (the only family heirlooom I have since I lost both my grandmother’s pocket watch and pearl necklace, which still makes me sad and ashamed to this day) fell off and I couldn’t find it meaning that the watch is out of use for the time being.
    • This is fixable, and hopefully won’t be very expensive.
  4. I met another mother while out walking with the baby and when she told me her baby’s name (a foreign one I hadn’t heard before) I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. When I asked the age, I inevitably went for the wrong gender which was very embarrassing.
    • This could have happened to anyone and it makes me neither racist nor rude. There are strange names in all cultures – many people might not know that Andrea is a man’s name in Italy. Also, the lady’s other child broke his bike bell and decided I was the authority on bike bells. He kept coming to me for advice on how to fix it even though he actually seemed very pessimistic too! “No, the supermarket doesn’t sell glue.” This is still cute when coming out of a five-year-old.
  5. I had lemon cake.
    • I had lemon cake!
  6. I overshot on calories today (1780 so far) and didn’t go for a run.
    • HELLO! LEMON CAKE TRUMPS ABS. And I’m going for a run tomorrow with my Mum (which is great because I love doing things with other people as has been established) and as she has a car meaning we can run in the countryside, not in ugly Reading suburbs!
  7. And i just realised that “ugly Reading suburbs” is a negative.
    • Reading is close to Oxford. There.
  8. Finally, I haven’t read any more of the Communist Manifesto, or gone through my mail, or written the birthday card to my friend in Barcelona, or worked on my friend Lola’s birthday present, or learnt Spanish/Icelandic/Norwegian/French, or cleaned the house, or called a place where they’re advertising for a job. That’s seven.
    • Phew. OK. Go: I read some more of Auntie Mame; I had a picnic in the park; I had coffee with my Mum; I booked holiday accommodation in Spain in September; I played guitar; I vacuumed the ground floor; and I still have time to read the Manifesto a little bit.

This is hard. It took ages.

But it’s worth it, I hope.

And when I’m really sad I just think of Iceland; an oasis in my spirit.

 

Bloquiry

How do you keep your spirits up? Do you have any little things you do to keep yourself positive?

1 comment:

  1. My main method of keeping the old spirits up involves listening to Owl City at ridiculously high volumes. That, or watching old Brotherhood 2.0 videos in chronological order. :)

    ReplyDelete

Any comments?