Health & Fitness
Three Things You May or May Not Know About Me
Meet AJ, the world's most positive pessimist.
1. I’ve gone through (and come out of) depression, grief and anxiety.
None of the books I’ve read on the above topics start out like this: “Depression, grief and anxiety suck. This is really going to suck. Really. Freaking. Suck.”
The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale quantifies the impact of your not-so-fun life experiences to determine how likely they are to make you nuts. And at one point in my life, I was literally off the charts. Performance anxiety, near social phobia, panic attacks, and Godzilla-sized grief staged an attack which made me want to seek shelter at the bottom of the ocean.
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We all want a way to be done with it. To avoid it. To not have to think about it. Or to find the one book/therapist/TV talk show host to tell us in 10 easy steps how to beat it. What have I learned? There is no one path. There is help, and it is everywhere, but no one person has the magic answer.
Is it ever going to end? I wish I could say yes. But there is always life stuff. Just when you think you’ve recovered from one thing, there’s another staring down the barrel at you. We can’t banish hard times, but we can develop a toolbox of coping techniques. I promise. My toolbox is packed. Home Depot is my middle name.
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2. I’m a recovering pessimist.
Well, let’s be honest. Pessimists don’t call themselves pessimists. We call ourselves realists. I was raised with the belief that happy people are oblivious. To be hopeful
meant to be delusional. And that being positive, well, was just a load of crap.
Then I met this girl. And she was…happy. It was such a curiosity to me. Like being at a freak show. I became fascinated with happiness and it didn’t take long before I just got tired of being miserable. So for 10 years I observed, studied, practiced. Happiness is not my goal, but being positive is my lifestyle choice. Being positive is hard work for me, it’s a daily practice. And some days, I’m not shooting for positive, I aiming for neutral.
At first I was a little afraid of what would happen if I shed my sarcastic, cynical crutch. But, much like the Grinch, over all these years of practicing positive, my heart has grown three times as big and I found the strength of 10 Grinches plus two.
3. I’ve passed the written test to be a tractor trailer driver. It’s a long story.
