On Understanding Negativity

While I do agree with many people that it is important to be positive in life I also choose to embrace the negative moments in my life. I just don’t embrace them, I feel them, I let them in, I exhaust them when I get the chance.

Once I am done with that negative feeling and I have cried and shuddered and moped all that I needed to, and then I let it go back into the universe and move on.

Are we really feeling life if we don’t feel the dark times, to lead how can we know only the good and not the bad?

History is bursting with examples of people that fell on dark times. Embraced them and then came out on the other end changed and more empowered because of it.

Vincent Van Gogh’s best work was in his declining years of mental health. Starry Night which is by far his most famous painting was painted while he was in Saint-Paul Asylum. Van Gogh melded the dark he felt into his work and painted what was around him. What he was feeling. Because of this embrace his is now able to evoke feelings through his work generations after his death in 1890.

The 16th president of the United Sates Abraham Lincoln use to have severe depression where he would weep for the plight of the downtrodden. No less of a man for crying or caring for the people he governed. He abolished slavery and is still ranked as one of the top presidents that ever served.  He felt the dark times of war, and still was more human. To lead others, you need to embrace both sides.

The world of literature is plagued with writers that lived in the world of depression. Ernest Hemmingway, Tennessee Williams, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. All incredible in their own right and all suffered to dark thoughts that led to tragic ends.

I myself have dark, negative moments. I was bullied as a child. I was too tall, too skinny, my hair not right and my clothes not in fashion. This went on from the moment I started Kindergarten to the day that I left High School. I cried, I wrote in my journal about it and in some moments I wished I could just disappear.

I found books at a young age and I wrote out my feelings. I explored characters in classic books such as Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maude Montgomery. Anne was an awkward character, teased but rose above it all.

When I was diagnosed with Cancer last year I took a day to live in the negativity. I contemplated what the outcome could look like. What was going to happen to me. I cried. I sat in the dark. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep.

I just let myself feel the loss of control of my own life. How my body was attacking me, making me sick. I shut everyone out and sat in my gloom.

Once I felt all there was to feel. I was able to move on. Start one day at a time and get through the surgery and then treatments.  Write about it, journal it.  Show people how you can lead them through the good and the bad in your life, and theirs.

To this day I am not even at my one year anniversary, you could call it, of my diagnosis but I’m good with my life.

Some days I even forget.

I am a stronger person than I was before this happened. I am in a positive place in my life. I felt the feelings that all Cancer patients must feel and I am able to talk about them with pride because I conquered them.

You are no less of a person if you fall to negativity. It’s how you pick yourself out of it is the true test.