Choosing to be Positive
Illustration by: Nydia Gomez
Almost everyone has been asked at one point in their lives if they see the glass as half-full or half-empty.
This question is to help you determine whether you have a more positive or negative outlook on life. For most of my own personal life, I was a glass half-empty kind of girl - and it wasn’t fun. I was told for years that I could change my perspective of the glass if I wanted to. That the way I saw the glass wasn’t the way I was born seeing it. It took me a while to believe this, but when I did, everything changed. I’m here to tell you that you can choose to have a positive attitude. I know that sounds shocking. Many people with negative perspectives don’t think they will ever change. They’ll always assume the worst is going to happen. They say they don’t want to, but they can’t help it. But you can help it. You can decide to look at the glass, and life, as being full instead of empty. It’s a hard idea to wrap your head around, but bear with me. My own philosophy on being positive or negative goes something like this. I personally think that complaining isn’t cool, and it’s something you should try not to do. Complaining makes you sound ungrateful... and it’s just boring. No one wants to be around someone who complains all the time. It was only after I decided to start having a positive attitude, that I realized how much I complained. As long as you’re being negative, you don’t really realize how negative you always are. When you start complaining about a situation too much, it causes you to start having negative thoughts about the situation, person, event, etc. Once you start having those negative thoughts, your feelings about the situation begin to change. It gives you a bad taste in your mouth that you can’t shake off. This becomes a problem when whatever you’re feeling negative about is something you have to do all the time. It causes you to feel miserable even though you don’t have to be. Just because you don’t like the situation or whatever it is, doesn’t mean you have to be miserable doing it. If you choose to be positive about it from the beginning, your entire experience changes. No, you may not like the person you’re having to work with or the job you have to do, but try to focus on the positive aspects of it rather than the negative. Life can be hard, so when you choose to find the positive in any situation you find yourself in, you’re adding a little bit of light back into, not only your life, but the lives of the people around you. Both positive and negative attitudes are contagious, so if you’re a negative person, you need to start thinking about which one you’d rather share.