Last week I posted Lent can mean Let’s Eliminate Negative Thinking, which was the end of that thought… or so I thought. But after chatting with Prince, who has been my sweetheart some 30 odd years, and Martha Giffen I decided to try to keep this thought going week by week until Easter. There are so many ways Negative Thinking seeps into our beings, changing that process can not be done in one week.

Sadly the topic this week has presented itself in multiple ways. A friend is in a women’s shelter. Another friend is dealing with someone’s suicide. Friends have lost jobs. A friend is dealing with the emotional scars from her father.

Growing up, I often heard “Born backwards, always backwards” and how I seemed to make a lot of mistakes, it seemed I could do nothing right. The lessons learned included “do not cry” and “always smile.” They did what they could, and it’s made me who I am.

But as I got older, life got more complicated. The mistakes made were bigger, and to keep anyone from knowing the pain going on, I buried them. But this meant I kept a miscarriage secret from everyone for years. I buried an assault so deep I forgot about it, until 3 months ago, and finally talked about this past week. Yet, I am a strong person, while I appear weak to some right now, it is just my body, mind and soul working past all these things. These things are part of a story I must tell, so I can stand on a soapbox and preach love.

Life is difficult. Life is painful. Life is hard. Yet, look at the other side of the coin. Life is also beautiful. Life is wonderful. Life is love.

The funny thing about a coin. You can’t see both sides at once. When you focus on the dark side of the life, unfortunately all you see is darkness. It becomes easier to see more things going wrong, more things that are painful. Solutions you know won’t end problems seem to make sense. Negative thoughts from the past make those solutions easier.

Yet those solutions typically trade one set of problems for another. Even worse the solutions that wouldn’t normally make sense, wind up hurting others. Avoiding problems as they crop up, does nothing but delay the inevitable.

For years, I didn’t deal with my miscarriage or the reasons why it happened. In that time, I blamed myself for more and more things, and walked an increasingly darker path. This is when I was assaulted, and I buried it all. There were times I stood upon that precipice of which there is no return, that solution would hurt others. So I walked a fine line of self-destruction that could go fairly unnoticed. This built a growing and teetering tower of problems.

Negative thinking is why I didn’t deal with these problems sooner. Negative thinking built the tower ever higher. Finally dealing with the miscarriage in 2003 started this path back toward the light.

Then something happened July 20^th, 2008,  I ended a 5 year relationship and felt the warmth of the sun. Since then the rocks from my teetering tower are falling, and I am having deal with the pain that created them, but I feel the warmth, others say they see me glow.

Here’s the summation of this story. People tell us negative thoughts, they give us negative advice, and more negative. It’s easy to accept these as facts, but they aren’t. The demons you fight today, you can slay. If they seem impossibly huge, then deal with one small demon first. That teetering tower of rocks can be taken down one rock at a time… by you. Take that tower down by finding the love, the hope, the single flower in bloom that gives you joy.

You, yes you. Look in the mirror, all the negative things, all the bad things, all the love, all the hugs, all the smiles given to you, have created that person who is looking at you from the mirror. That person is you, and you are the most beautiful you there is. You are the perfect you.

Love,
MJ