What makes me happy....

When you are unhappy, you tend to think of all the negative thoughts and often, you try to transfer blame, or try to find blame. I often find there is no blame. Things just do not happen for a reason and you just have to believe that things happen outside your understanding for a bigger reason unknown to you now or forever, but there may be some good for you - May it be of a perception or other personal growth!

I often dwell in the big questions of WHY did it happen? Could I have prevented it? What happened? How did it happen? Is it my FAULT??? What did I DO? Often, when I do not have the answers or when it is blur-ish, I tend to get upset… And obviously when you are upset, your mind plays tricks on you, like bringing you flashbacks on how things were before, and how you have managed to destroy things again for the umpteenth time!!!

Well… Not this time, I told myself! This time, I will not be so destructive towards myself! This time I will try to be more positive and think happy thoughts… All problems have a solution and I am good at problem-solving! I have gone through a lot of life experiences to be able to cope with something as significant in my adult life! I CAN DO THIS….

As I was thinking of ways to cheer up from being “LOW”, I began to think of things that makes me happy and try to focus on that and imagine and visualize… without me realizing it… a smile crept up on me…

These are the things that makes me happy… Obviously the list is not exhaustive, but is just some of the things I immediately thought of in the car as I was driving!

• Smiling faces of my mum and dad
• Smiling faces of my sisters
• Smiling faces of my little cousins and niece
• Laughter of my family members
• Thoughts and visuals of being hugged
• Thoughts and visuals of being loved
• Thoughts and visuals of being wanted
• Thoughts and visuals of being accepted
• My childhood memories of having fun
• My patients saying “thank you”
• My patients saying “please”
• Having friends
• And more

Suddenly, I don’t feel so alone… I have people to give me support even if they don’t know that they are providing it… The thought of others in my life helps me to realize that I am not an individual standing alone… I am part of a collective of people I call my family! And most of the time, they are around to pull me through the hardest moments in my life without even them knowing it… I realized I have used this strategy before when I was a student far away from home… Thoughts of my family often is the driving force of me studying and staying in a foreign land without “friends” and “family” to nurture you…

What comes to mind now is this question: Why am I always unhappy? I obviously have issues, and I know this… but to get help and get them addressed? Probably not in Brunei! Why not, considering I am in the health profession and most probably know a lot of people I can ‘talk’ to… the answer is TRUST… I lack trust… SIMPLE!!!

But I do think by writing it down and letting it go from my chest is a healthy method to a certain degree… I just need to adapt a greater coping mechanism for whatever problem that will fly my way… and as other problems I have dealt with, will leave me almost scratch-free!

AND to leave you happy and smiling, I let you read a small section of a book I am currently reading called “Autobiography of a One-Year-Old” as told to Rohan Candappa. ISBN 0-553-58413-8, Page: 33-34

NURSERY CRIME TWO: WHEN THE WIND BLOWS

“Rock-a-bye Baby,
On the treetop.
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
Down will come baby, cradle and all.”

Point one: What on earth is the cradle doing in the tree in the first place? What kind of psycho parent is going to lovingly nestle a baby in a cradle, then climb up a tree with it and leave it there? And, note, not just anywhere in the tree, but right up on the treetop?

Point two: When the cradle is in the treetop, what starts happening? The wind starts blowing. You might think that even the cruelest parent would feel just a bit remorseful and climb back up the tree and rescue the baby. But no. Oh, no. Quite the opposite. The parent self-evidently just sits it out and waits for things to go from bad to badder.

How do I know this? Well, just examine what happens next. What happens next is that the bough breaks. Now, I know for a fact that a wind has to be pretty damn powerful to break a bough, especially a bough that is strong enough to have carried the weight of a cradle and a baby in the first place. So we are confronted by the nightmare scenario, “Down will come baby, cradle and all.”

And that my friends, is the end of the nursery rhyme. There is no mention of the parent rushing to the base of the tree in an effort to catch the plummeting baby. I mean, I don’t think I’d mind if the parent missed the catch, but not even to have tried is, in my book, an outrage.

But now here’s the really sick part of the whole deal. The nightmare tale of deliberate cruelty, staggering evil and trauma-inducing indifference to child welfare isn’t a searing indictment of the contemporary world designed to make us agitate for change and alert us to the dangers of inadequate child rearing in a society whose values have gone seriously awry. Oh, no. This nightmare is supposed to help us go to sleep.

I ask you, what kind of sick individual came up with that toss of the dice?