Half-full or Half-empty?

Half-empty? Half-full?
Everyone has a different opinion or perspective on this age old question of negativity vs positivity. I'll be the first to admit that I'm the Half-Empty type but over the past few years with all the struggles I've gone through and the thinking - forced and otherwise - I've done, I'm trying harder to let my mind swing a little when it comes to viewing this glass.

Maybe it's my disorder or my depression or just simply who I am but the positives of situations don't come nearly as easy for me as the negatives. I'm emotional all the time and on those bad days when everything I see, touch, hear makes me cry, (like today) I curse those emotions and wish I could just box them up and send them away, and in some ways I have.

I was on a widely-used medication at one point that made me emotionless. Picture that, someone with a disorder described as emotional dysregulation whose life evolves around not logic but emotion, having no emotions at all. My husband says it was like I was encased in a glass box, I could see out and everyone else could see in but I was unreachable and basically didn't give a crap about anything. I hate that my kids saw me that way and I hate that my doctors insisted it was the right solution for me. I may want to rip my heart out so I don't have to feel at all some days but that's definitely not the way to do it.

Emotions are the language of everyone's mental and emotional state of being and are tied to a person's social and physical sensory feelings. They tell you how to react to different situations and are necessary for expressing what you feel and need. They do need to be controlled - I get that - but having them taken away completely is not the answer. Taking my emotions away also took my creativity away and that was totally unacceptable for someone who uses their creativity to express everything they feel on the inside but don't know how to deal with on the outside. That's what my writing does to and for me. It lets me relay how I'm feeling on the inside by letting me breathe on the outside. That doesn't mean I feel what my characters are feeling or visa-versa, it just means I use how I'm feeling to shape the situation I've put my characters in. I can be feeling like complete crap, like my world is falling down and still write a scene where the love just jumps off the page. In that way, it doesn't seem to matter what I'm writing just as long as I'm doing it.

The fact that I've dipped my toe into writing publicly, opening myself up for emotional criticism and failure is nothing short of a miracle. All I know is I need to write and when someone likes what I'm writing, when I'm getting positive feedback it flutters and zaps my hug-seeking heart and makes me feel like I'm doing something right - something important to someone besides me. I know it's just fiction and it's just fluffy versions of reality but as Sally Field said so famously, it makes me feel like "You like me, you really like me". I won't talk about the scary as fuck part of having people not like what you write - we'll save that for later.

I've totally shifted from what I had intended on writing about but that's par for the course on a day (during a couple of statistically hard months) that is an emotional roller coaster for me. I started out wanting to talk about being more positive in my life and how I was going to do that but now, that's just not even in my sights. Instead I'll try a little exercise a really mean but totally wonderful psych nurse used to make me do (he was a hot Australian boy to boot). A gratitude list. I usually suck at these lists but hey, let's give it a try.

I am grateful for my over-emotionality because:

- it makes me empathetic towards others' situations
- it fuels my writing and allows me to express the inner feelings of my characters a little more realistically
- it keeps things interesting (lol)
- it balances the tough, independent exterior I try so hard to maintain by providing a big gushy, mushy, sappy centre
- it makes me write long-ass posts like this so y'all think I'm even crazier than I am :)

And while I'm in the swing of it - here are some other things I am grateful for:

- my beautiful kids who turned out impossibly normal and well-adjusted despite who raised them (lol)
- my online friends who take the good with the crazy and support me on a day-to-emotional-day basis
- my ability to put words on a page that sometimes actually make sense
- the two publishers who gave a newbie a chance this year and made do an actual happy dance (just inside of course)
- the quiet, stillness of my empty house during the week
- my cats who insist on making me pet and hug them so they can purr and love me back
- the beautiful men around the world who take the time to hug and love each other so others can take their pictures and post them online so people like me can ohh and ahh at them

And with that I will leave you with some pretty pictures that make me happy, and a hope that you all have a glass half-full weekend. :)

Bartek Borowiec is now my inspiration for my witch, Alistair, in Family of Misfits and I'm chomping at the bit to write his storyeven though it's not his turn