I feel like I am so quick to talk about all that life has taken away. I want to take a moment to express gratitude for all that life has given.
To come to this place where I want to even express gratitude is a big deal for me. For what seems like all of my life I've felt that this life was unfair. That it was a constant sadness and madness and that no matter what I do to try to be happy it would always allude me. The fact of the matter is that the main reason I only saw what I was losing was because that was what I focused on.
I focused on the crumbling of my family, losing significant others, the loss of loved ones.
I just focused everything in me on the sadness.
Not intentionally, though. It is extremely hard to focus on the good when it seems like turn after turn is filled with more sadness. Couple that with the never ending anxiety and depression and it's pretty easy to see how I was able to feel that way.
However, in the spirit of all the good changes I have made in the past couple of months, I made a deal with myself to not only acknowledge the good in my life right now, but to also confront the good in my past. It was there, in what seemed like moments at times.
It was there within a first kiss, a night in with friends, a photoshoot with good people, a time when all of my family was together again.
Life had given me those moments to see what I would make of them and I chose to ignore them.
So here I am after all this time reflecting on my life and putting the bad parts to the side to focus on the good.
I know that there will be good and bad times because that IS life. It is not all sunshine and rainbows. There are going to be hard times along with hard lessons that need to be learned. But what I've chosen for myself going forward is to see both sides of the coin. Yes, this sucks but what have I learned? What parts of this made me genuinely happy.
Here is a little bit of what life has given me:
The chance to learn and make my own decisions. It has given me the ability to change my life when I want to. It has given me the ability to sing my little heart out when I am happy, and to sing to drown out my sadness. It has given me the right people in my life. People who stand by me and cheer me on. But it has also taken away some of the ones I truly thought were friends. Life has shown me so much anger and sadness but also gave me the hands and courage to write about those experiences. It has given me one of my dream jobs while putting me through some of the hardest years of my life. Life gave me this beautiful mind to create, but made it so easily drown itself in sorrow.
Life has taken so much out of me, and it almost did me in.
But then life did this beautiful thing, and it with everything it took, it gave me so much more.
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