When you're having a crappy day (and I'm not right now, but I'm postulating here), I think there is often this urge to do something for ourselves in order to cheer us up.  Eat chocolate.  Buy something new.  Watch a comfort movie.  There's not a thing in the world wrong with this, and sometimes it's just the ticket to tug you out of the doldrums.  

But I want to challenge you to try something else.  Something you might not have thought about.  

When you're having a lousy time of it, do something nice for someone else.

Say what?

Bear with me.  This approach serves a couple of  purposes:

1) It gets you outside your own head to thinking about somebody else (a good thing for perspective purposes).
2) When you take the time to do something nice, like make a meal, and take it unexpectedly to someone else, then you get the double lift of their gratitude and the knowledge that even when you're down, you managed to brighten someone else's day.  And I don't know about you, but that really makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Oooo, I have been JAZZED TODAY.  Combination overdose on candy corn (it is October, so my moratorium is over and I am allowed to have 2 bags until Halloween, when the moratorium goes into effect again), and creative adrenaline from having finished reading my crit partner's zero draft.  It was freaking AMAZING, and it absolutely got my creative juices flowing on some of my own projects.  This YA trilogy I'm writing has been very murky after this first book, and today I had a MAJOR epiphany regarding the end game of the whole thing and am starting to sort out the overarching concept of the middle book.  And I got 1200 words written on my primary WIP today.  Oh, and I ran for the first time in two weeks.  3.2 miles in 37:45.  After the two week layoff, I was really pleased with that.  All in all a GREAT day.

After yesterday's relative suckitude, today was a lovely rebound.

• The weather was BEAUTIFUL and in the 60s.
• I had a MARVELOUS long lunch with a friend who's in town for the month.
• And I got halfway through the zero draft of one of my BFFs and it is OMFG AMAZING (the downside being that I didn't have time to get to the end!)

It was nice that the icky mood from yesterday didn't carry through.

It's easy to be positive when things are going well.  You don't have to think hard to say "oh yeah, this, that, and the other thing were good today."  

But there are some days--days when you know immediately it should've been a two cup morning, you shouldn't have left the house, and all you REALLY wanna be doing is taking an afternoon nap--when positive just doesn't feel possible.  Because everything is lining up to suck.  These are days when you REALLY have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with something positive to focus on, and even then, they're such minuscule things, they hardly seem like objects of focus in the first place.  

Stuff like...

• It's raining, so the new trees I planted will be happy.
• I got to read a couple of chapters of a good book while sitting at the chiropractor's office.
• I didn't get hit by a truck on my way to work (which on this kind of day feels like less of a positive because you really wish the ground would just open up and swallow you and where did you put that incantation?)

Oh. My. God.  Y'all it is such a Monday with a capital M.  

I am absolutely not going to sit here and list all the reasons why I'm struggling with the positive today.  That would be giving all those things way more importance than they ought to have.  But...yeah, I'm feeling pretty frayed at the edges just now.  

So I'm going to apply the same kind of rule to this positivity thing that I do to writing.  See, I spent YEARS deluding myself that I could train myself to write EVERY DAY.  And it was a goal I always ultimately failed on because the truth is that life happens and sometimes you just can't write.  So I finally settled on a goal of writing at least 20 days out of every 30.  This has worked out really well for me, and it's a goal I can meet and usually exceed.

I'm not setting a particular number of days out of every month to be positive.  That feels silly and kind of forced. But if I have an off day where I'm struggling to find the positive, I'm going to make a vow to try and not allow it to turn into two in a row, to get back on that positivity train when I get up the next day and not lug the emotional baggage of the previous day's suck with me.  Which is, in a way, I suppose a practice of the idea of letting go that is way more prevalent in Eastern philosophies

It's late and I need to haul my fanny to bed since tomorrow is Monday, but I wanted to pop on to report one very EPIC yay for the day.  

• This month I officially broke my record for MOST WORDS WRITTEN IN A MONTH.  Ever.  Just over 22k (prior record about 20.5k and that being very rare in itself).  
• In that vein, I'm also ecstatic about a scene I wrote over the weekend that was unplanned and turned out to be just AWESOME (and has me seriously crushing on the love interest in this triangle that she's NOT supposed to end up with).  
• Also, hubs and I did our first ever newborn photo shoot for our friends who just had an adorable baby girl.  The photos turned out GREAT (it helps that the subject was cute as a freaking button).  The Aaaaaw factor was pretty darn high.
• And it's worth noting that I made kick ass bacon gouda burgers for dinner.  Small but always worth celebrating.

One of the things that I have always struggled with over the course of my life is my weight.  I am prone to be, shall we say, thick.  Nothing about my body suggests the waif-like thinness that is so popular and striven for.  I'm not quite 5'4" tall, and I'm SOLID.  Even during the brief period of my life when I got down to the coveted size 2 my freshman year of college (courtesy of a major depression), I was still very solid.  Then I met my husband, got happy, and progressively gained 5 pounds a year for the next several years.  

I learned yo-yo dieting from my mom--a mix of useful health knowledge with a lot of completely nonsensical behaviors (like, if I fell off the wagon and had dessert on Friday, oh well I've blown the week and should keep blowing it until I can start over on Monday because who starts things on the weekend?).  I've never been good at starving myself (I don't consider that a bad thing), so since i was a teen, I have made great effort to try to balance out my 6'4", 240 pound linebacker appetite with exercise.  I picked up weight lifting at age 14, martial arts at 18, yoga at 19, various and sundry other cardio and fitness activities between then and now which I've kept up with varying degrees of success.  I started running this year at the ripe old age of 32.  

Sometime when I was in grad school, well after my marriage started, I began reading a lot of stuff about health and fitness.  The goal was, of course, to find that elusive perfect way for me to lose weight.  But an unexpected side effect is that it began a mental shift for me, one wherein I continually paired health with fitness, not weight loss with fitness.  And somewhere in there, I made a conscious effort to start thinking in terms of health rather than weight loss or being "skinny".  Because I'm never going to be truly skinny by those standards.  It's just now how I'm built.  Plus, numbers on the scale don't mean a whole heck of a lot.  According to those standardized height/weight charts, I should weigh approximately 120 pounds.  Given I have 106 pounds of lean body mass, I'm thinking that largely does not apply to me (weight lifting for the majority of the last 18 years, remember).  People consistently peg my actual weight at 15-20 pounds less than it actually is.  I think, too, part of it was watching the decline of my grandparents' health, seeing my friends go through pregnancy at every point on the fit and healthy spectrum, and generally making a very conscious decision that I want to be fit and healthy.  

This is not the normal view in American society.  It is counter to so much of the socialization women experience in relation to body image.  People rarely talk about health (at least until it starts to decline) for women.  It's always about how we look, whether that's our size or some other thing we're unhappy about.  It's an absolutely toxic crazy train, and I'm thrilled to be off of it.  If I have a daughter, I hope I'm able to instill positive self image and healthy habits.

Do I still diet?  No.  It finally registered that I simply need to have a healthy lifestyle.  One in which I splurge sensibly and eat healthy the rest of the time.  Do I still count calories?  Yep.  Because doing so, measuring what I eat and keeping track of it (on Sparkpeople), keeps me honest.  People are psychologically prone to totally underestimate how much they consume, and in a world of Super Size Portions, that is a very bad thing.  But I don't obsess.  I don't go crazy.  I don't limit myself so much that a single meal out with friends leaves me in tears because that one meal was my entire calorie budget for the day (been there, done that, don't wanna go back).  I still need to drop a few pounds (so say my favorite Levis), and I still weigh.  But not daily.  Not with obsession or focus.  I weigh twice a month, and I've finally hit on a calorie budget and fitness regimen (one that I actually ENJOY) that means I drop a conservative pound every two weeks--even with dietary indulgences and days I don't actually count my calories.  Which is actually what has me thinking about this today because I had quite a few of those dietary indulgences the last couple weeks and my back kept me largely off my exercise program this week, and I'm still down a pound.

I feel good about myself.  I have a positive self-image at 32 that I could never have related to as a chunky teen in high school.  I'm physically fit, healthy across all medical standards (BP, cholesterol, blood sugar), I've made peace with my thunder thighs, and I'm able to focus more on the positive aspects of my body (uber tiny waist) than the negative (though I confess, I'm on a warpath against my tricep jiggle).  That healthy, happy attitude plays in to how other people see you.  Same as confidence makes people more attractive.  

So if you're a woman (or a man!) who struggles with body image, with weight loss, I encourage you to take a little time to think about whether your focus is on the wrong thing.  Instead of measuring your success (or failure) by whether you fit society's totally unrealistic ideal body image, look at what you can do to improve your health.  Pick ONE THING to change (like I picked exercise)The socialized messages that go along with HEALTH are a lot more positive than those that go along with SKINNY.  And as we've established, we can all use a little more positive in our lives.

My day got off to a marvelous beginning!

• I got to do a normal, full workout.  My back is pretty well back to normal (if a little bit stiff).  I should be back to my normal running routine on Monday!  I could do it over the weekend, but...well, it's not cool enough to do that yet here in Mississippi unless you're up early, and I hold moral objections to getting up early on the weekend.
• I remembered that it was unit test week (I teach upper level psychology classes online), which meant I had no weekly discussion questions to grade!  Two hours FREE!
• My boss is out of the office, which, given she is often a very stress inducing person, is also much cause for celebration.  I got to work in glorious quiet.
• Perhaps the biggest yay of the day is that I read through Act 3 of my current book and actually liked it.  I have been struggling with what I like to refer to as The Dreaded Valley of the Shadow of the Middle, mired up to my eyeballs in it for three months.  And I've generally felt like I was doing something wrong with the plot that was going to lead to massive rewrites during the revision pass.  Buuuuut, maybe not.  It's always nice to go back and be pleasantly surprised by prose you didn't think was that good.

All in all, a pretty fabulous Friday!

Most of today was spent setting up the structure and explanation for this blog, but I would be remiss if I didn't actually record my positives of the day (which was, after all, largely the point).  

So my Yays for the Day:

• I can move without HURTING again.  I hyperextended a nerve on Tuesday (who knew you could do the same thing to nerves as to muscles?), so I've been pretty gimpy the last couple of days.  I wasn't what you'd call comfy in my office chair today, but I was able to sit in it all day, which was BIG improvement over the prior to days.  I should be able to get back to running on Monday.  YAY!
• I discovered a FABULOUS new soundtrack on Spotify (Spotify is another of my addictions and is what is currently keeping me from going bankrupt buying new music to write to) for writing fight scenes.  The score for Army of Two by Trevor Morris is phenomenal.  I've never even heard of this movie, but it's got that good, dig deep, find the extra OOMPH to go GET EM to almost every track.  GREAT for choreographing fight scenes (I'm a writer, remember?  Fight scenes are one of my specialties).  This might even make it on to my running mix.
• Also, Big Bang Theory starts back tonight.  I have missed me some Sheldon.  Bazinga!

So this is my inaugural post.  Welcome.  I've already talked about what this blog is intended to be over here, so it doesn't seem to bear repeating.  In a nutshell, I am striving to become a more positive person, abandoning my natural cynicism on a desert island with a pistol and a single shot.  

I've already made strides to cut negative, toxic people out of my life, as much as I can.  And I'm seeking out more of the naturally positive people who make me smile just by popping up in a chat window to say "Hi".  The people who enrich and enhance my life just by being in it.  I want to be that naturally positive person for someone else.  

So here I am, on a journey to turn myself into an optimist.  Not the kind who turns a blind eye to problems, but the kind of person who adheres to the philosophy that it will all turn out all right in the end--and if everything is not all right, it is not the end.  

My roadmap to this end goal is to strive to find the positive in the everyday.  So that if somebody asks me, "How was your day?" I can recount something awesome instead of the annoying thing my boss did or this disappointment or that rude remark someone made.  Life is full of stress.  That's a constant that isn't going to change as long as I'm breathing.  The trick is learning to manage it and focusing on the positive.  

I'm not making any claims toward having all the answers.  I'm DEFINITELY not claiming all my posts will be interesting to other people.  But maybe I'll have a few gems pop up from time to time.  And I hope to pick up some more of those positive people along the way.  

Welcome to my positivity safari.