hi, natalie.
there are two kinds of complainers. there's the kind that piss and moan, pout and drag on their vowels when they whiiiiine. then there's the kind of complainer that is nonchalant about it. in other words they don't really know they're complaining, but everything they say is negative. I suffer from both, but I am a profesh at the second kind. here's an example.
how are you today natalie?
I'm good. I mean I haven't slept well in weeks and have had this shitty cold for two weeks. but I'm good.
see the sneaky-ness of it?
what did you think of that movie natalie?
it was great, except the beginning was kinda slow, then the middle was a little strange, and the ending was so predictable. but totally good.
I'm starting to realize more and more that I'm hearing, oh I'm sorry, a lot. I'm sorry you're sick. I'm sorry you're tired. I'm sorry I picked out a lame movie and you could write a better script and make a better one. bottom line is what on earth do I have to complain about? no one should be saying sorry to me. I have everything I could ever want or need. I have an amazing marriage with a saint of a man, two healthy kids who also have everything they need, a kitchen full of food, we all have beds to sleep in. If I wanted to go out to dinner tonight, I could. If I wanted to buy a life size cut out of Zooey Deschanel for my living room right now, I could. I mean...
who'd want to do that? :)
how can we alter our thinking to where what comes out of our mouths is more positive? I don't want people to be feeling compelled to apologize to me. that is not ok with me and I want to change it. I am not saying there aren't going to be times when I'm just going to have to be honest when someone asks how I am, but how do I change the percentage of positive so it outweighs the negative? perspective. I gotta keep on keepin on. when something gets brought to my attention about something that bothers me about myself, only I can change it. and I want to.
in other news, I hope you're having a glorious friday. happy april!
When I used to work at trade shows my coworkers and I would get really bored and start to criticize the people around us. After realizing that this was a bad habit to get into we made a game of finding one thing that we genuinely liked about everyone that walked by. One thing that we could honestly complement them on. Sometimes it was hard but we found something about everyone and it became a lot more fun than putting people down. Maybe you could do that with your conversations. Find the one thing that you liked about that stupid movie or your crappy cold and only mention that part.
ReplyDeletei love you natalie, and am proud of your desire to be a better person for us. just to encourage you, i will love the positive natalie just as much as the negative natalie.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that I say, "that's really hard" or "it was so hard" and then one day i realized my life is really not that hard. and i wanted to stop saying that. sometimes i will catch myself using that word again and realize that i don't want to so ... i get what you are saying. but i feel you are a positive person, you certainly bring a lot of joy to me on my really "hard" days :) hee hee hee
ReplyDeleteoh and i want a life size of zoey somewhere.
ReplyDelete