My new 'tude, part 3

In part 1, my friend accused me of drinking too much.

In part 2, I disagreed, but admitted that my drinking had taken on a new dimension - drinking to forget the things in my life I'm not happy about, instead of just drinking for fun.

In all honesty, I never wanted this to become some drawn out blog saga. I intended to start and finish, to present the problem and then wrap it up all nicely with a bow, within the same blog post.

The problem is that now, 2 weeks later, I have no desire to finish what I started. I no longer believe the things I felt so strongly about when I wrote part 1 - the new me, the new attitude I was going to take towards my problems. But maybe if I put them out there, I'll rediscover what so inspired me. So here we are.

I recently started reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which, aside from the fact that it takes way too long to make each of the 7 points, is a really fantastic book.

The first habit, "Be Proactive," is all about taking responsibility over your life. It's about no longer finding a scapegoat on which you can blame each and every shitty thing that happens to you. While you can't influence your external environment, you can influence what you do, and how you react, in response to them. It teaches you to stop playing the victim and to start taking control.

When I read this I was really inspired. My mood lifted almost immediately, and I experienced what for me can only be described as near-mania. I walked around with my head held higher, and I felt as though I had a new power that I didn't have before. I didn't have to just sit back and accept my fate in life. Wah wah I lost my job and all this other crap - so what? While I didn't have the ability to just snap my fingers and have everything be perfect, I had the ability, nay, the responsibility, to not just sit around and be helplessly bummed about it. It was in that moment that I wrote part 1.

Much like with most new and exciting things, the novelty wore off quite quickly. I realized that telling yourself that you refuse to be sad is much easier than actually refusing to be sad. After all, how can you really just change the way you naturally react to something? You can't help how you feel.

So I've realized it's not as easy as I thought. But even though I'm not as elated as I was 2 weeks ago, even though the light at the end of the tunnel is slightly further outside my grasp, I'm not giving up. I keep trying to train myself to think more positively and to keep a mindset of motivation to do better, not one of "woe is me."

So we'll see how it goes. I'm definitely someone who enjoys the occasional good wallow in self-pity, so it's going to be a struggle for me to really try and always look on the bright side. But people under much higher levels of duress have made it happen (the book gives some particularly amazing examples), and hopefully, so can I.

I'll drink to that! (Kidding)