A guest blog by GCSE English student, Marianna Dorsett
How to fight that pervasive negative outlook
The profound fact of life is everyone will unwillingly and unquestionably experience a number of hardships in their lives. And, ironically, most stem from your very own heads. Humans are naturally very good at wallowing in their own self-pity; one small hiccup in their plans and they take the idea that the world doesn’t want them to flourish, run with it, and end up in a self-deprecating tsunami of ifs, buts and maybes. Believe me when I say that I am a perpetrator too, and there is absolutely nothing shameful about it (apart from the fact it’s preventing a fulfilling life), so admitting it and doing something about it is the real message here.
In this article, I am going to talk further about what we are doing wrong, and the small changes we can make to set it right.
What is a bad situation?
Many people will define a bad situation as many different things: a bad hair day, the unjustified wage gap between genders or making a joke that no one seems to laugh at and only ensues an awkward silence. Yikes. Yet, no one seems to notice the ones swimming around in your head, unbeknownst where they even stem from, which urge you to question every possible embarrassing or unsuccessful scenario that could come of a proposition, inhibiting you from ever doing something that could genuinely satisfy your life.
One poor thought bathes in a sea of positivity and drags you under, debilitating you and it has been happening for so long, the delusion of it all is lost behind the pitiful amount of love and belief.
Now that, is the true bad situation – the one I am going to be talking about today. That was all a little too real and depressing so let’s swiftly move on to how we fix it!
So, how do we make the best of a bad situation?
The poet Oscar Wilde stated, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.”
Well, I suggest we all try to become a part of that small minority: take every chance that is thrown at us because let me remind you we are living as one of over 7 billion of the same species, on a floating globe in the middle of god knows what. No one will remember that time we stumbled in a speech in front of the entire company, but we would be remembered for all the work we did with the children in Kenya after we decided to go on that gap year we’ve been dreaming about.
I can hear the frustrations of the anxious reader through the pages, ‘but it isn’t that simple, is it?’ ‘How do I even begin to think about what I truly want?’ I cannot talk to every reader individually, so I will have to be more general:
- Failure is only established when you stop trying. If you attempt something that you want, the only way you fail is if you quit – you cannot fail if, although it doesn’t work the first time, you go again until it does.
- Only you can tell that silly little brain of yours that it is worth a go. Progress doesn’t begin until you urge yourself to experiment. “one bad day doesn’t mean a bad life”, and that’s applicable to this: one stumble along the road does not make the task unachievable.
- Doing what is right and doing what is right for you are almost never the same thing. This outlook may be deemed selfish but, within reason this could just be the antidote to your moping. At the end of the day, you are all you have in this world and that may seem daunting, but when you realise that that leads to a life full of joy and happiness tailored to you it can begin to feel a little more like comfort.
Where to even start
A lot of life lessons have been chucked about all over the place in this article, but may I remind you that your life begins and ends with you. There will always be things that go wrong, setbacks, times when nothing feels possible but the more you repeatedly catch the times you doubt yourself, and set it right even just mentally, belief and hope will spring to life in the garden that is entirely your own. You can choose what flowers you grow, and whether you will have a dog to give it some vivacity. Equally, it can be filled with other people, trampling the grass until its mud.
Make it your own, and ask, “what do I want to say I have achieved in my lifetime and be proud of?”
