I am fascinated (and completely annoyed by) the human tendency to blame anything that happens to them on everything in the world but themselves. Why do we do this? Furthermore, people who consistently and outwardly announce the unfairness of all that happens to them, they can’t possibly believe this, can they?

Life can be hard and arbitrarily cruel, and while I don’t know that I believe in karma, I am also consistently amazed by the people who always have bad things happening to them. The self fulfilling power of the universe gives zero shits for those who don’t change their ways. ME included.

Last summer and fall I was at a pretty low point, enough so that friends sat me down to try and figure out what was going on. I had some reasons to be that way but mostly anytime I had anything adversarial happen to me, I just doubled down on it and got more miserable. Turns out that misery loves more misery and more misery breeds, well, more misery still .

So what changed? Two things. First, I got fed up enough with my situation to face some of them and make positive choices every day. Second, I began taking control of the things I could that caused me the most stress and work on them instead of ignoring them

I’ll never discount depression or say the way out is to “just choose to.” BUT, I will say that a choice to make even the smallest step towards deciding to not embrace the hole you’re in has enormous emotional value.

Even if there are well documented events and outside forces that have impacted people in a negative way, we still have a choice to decide if we are fed up.

I really love the notion of having to be more fed up with not doing something and that outweighing the status quo. It’s like a super simple way to make changes in our lives.

It’s a hell of a lot more controllable than blame.

#hugsandhi5s