🦋 💜 🌿 Hi! How are you?
I am trying to shake a sore throat. Hopefully, it goes away soon.
Feeling a little emotional today. Which makes sense…
August always begins dramatically for me –
the 8th is my bday, while
the 6th is my dad’s death day.
Because these dates have come together in the same week for me ever since I turned 34, they will always be tied together in a bittersweet way.
I’ll be 38 this week, and, of course, I still miss my dad. He was my only parent growing up because my mom died when I was three.
Creating in Darkness
If you haven’t felt deep grief for a loved one who went too soon, it’s nothing I can describe to you in words.
I don’t believe that losing a loved one has a silver lining.
But I think the human spirit is so incredibly bright that it can keep burning and making beauty no matter what.
Even in the most difficult times, or the darkest of days.
In it, I share about things I learned about grief, myself, and the world. How to survive bad things, and get up out of bed anyway.
Growth & Evolution
While grieving and missing my dad, I have changed a lot and grown these past few years. I’ve become a new version of myself.
I grew out my hair from the pixie cut I had for a decade.
I got married, and now I am having a baby.
I will keep on evolving, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back to who I was.
And that’s okay, because who I am today isn’t someone I became passively as a result of my experiences.
–This transformation inside and out has been my choice, an intentional creative process I decided to undergo.
I knew a change in my identity was inevitable, anyway, so I decided to grab the wheel and steer towards who I wanted to be.
Specifically, over the past year, I’ve had certain goals for myself.
My Goal For Last Year
What I wanted to address over the last year was my lack of optimism and motivation.
Because my dad’s death made me distrust the universe.
It wasn’t the first bad thing that happened in my life so it felt like the last straw.
I lost hope that good things were possible for me.
It didn’t matter if I was a good person or not, or if I worked hard.
Some dumb shit was just going to happen to ruin my life anyway.
(Like my dad getting pancreatic cancer and dying suddenly, even though otherwise he was in the best shape of his life.)
Basically, how I felt deep down was that there was no real point in trying to achieve anything good in life, because it’s just a bad universe.
Bad things happen to good people. There’s nothing I can do about a lot of things that suck in life.
And yet…
A bit over a year ago, I decided I was tired of feeling that way.
And of letting it stop me from trying to make anything about my life better.
I figured that I had a choice:
I could either be right
that there was no point in hoping for a better life or trying for it
or I could be happy.
I could be right, or I could be happy, but I couldn’t be both.
So I decided I’d rather be happy.
The Transformation
A year ago, if I measured how optimistic I was feeling on a scale of 1-10,
on an average day, I was probably around a 4.
After I decided to work on being optimistic,
I tried different tools to raise that number.
I started tracking it daily.
After 30 days, it was up to a 6.
That number began to rise, and then rise a little more.
Now, a year later, my optimism is around an 8 out of 10 most days.
Conclusion
I’ve come a long way in a relatively short time.
Life isn’t perfect.
The world, and things I experience closer to home, still have problems.
But I feel a little more optimistic about things in general.
Specifically, I am optimistic about my slice of things.
I’m motivated to take action in my own life and work to make things better.
And I trust myself, and am optimistic that I will be able to handle whatever happens.
Which is the thing that really matters.
By the way…
I put everything that worked for me into a Toolkit so you can feel more optimism in 30 days or less.
If you are on a journey to find the hope, and motivation to take action on your goals,
​explore the 30 Day Optimism Toolkit to get started today.​
Thanks for reading
