Challenge accepted

I saw this on Facebook and it got me thinking.  How successful am I at doing these things?  Quite honestly, not very successful.

1.  I have nowhere near made peace with my past and the worst part of that is that if I can't, how can I expect others to not judge me my by my past?  I am bipolar (which I have accepted) but before the diagnosis, I was bat shit crazy.  Hell, even quite a few times since the diagnosis, I have lost it and not been in a place of all that much control.  The Christmas season is, by far, the hardest for me and I have made it through that this year successfully so that is a step in the right direction.  I need to find the strength to accept that one bad decision or even a series of bad decisions don't make you bad.  They just make you a person who had made bad decisions on occassion.

2.  While I respect that what other people think of me is none of my business, I am the ultimate people pleaser and really, really do care what people think of me.  WAY too much, WAY, WAY too much.  This I am going to work on, period.

3.  This one, I don't know that I agree with completely.  I guess in someways you heal but when trauma touches your life, you change and you are never, ever the same.  So are the wounds really healed or just bandaged tightly making you an entirely different person in the process.  Sorry, 7 Cardinal Rules For Life, time does not heal all wounds.  Yes, you make peace, yes you accept, yes you move on but to be completely healed I think is just impossible.

4.  In controlling my happiness, I need to find acceptance for the crappy hand I have been dealt and happiness will come.  I was always a relatively happy person but I think she is just gone.  Do I feel happiness from time to time, well, of course.  But more of my time is spent in fear than happiness.  I have now grown so afraid of doctors and everything that they have to say to me that I feel defeated a lot, too.  But this cardinal rule is true, I can change this.  I can be the glass half full person I once was and stop feeling sorry for myself.  My health is poor, so what, so are millions of other peoples but I just need to live life and live it hard.  No one knows what tomorrow brings so live each day happy and as if it your last.  This one I am going to work on, too.

5.  I never compare my life to others because I don't want to walk a mile in someone else's shoes because you know what, their shoes won't fit.  God chose this life for me for a reason and every other person's lives were chosen for a reason.  A lot of the time, we wonder why or what that reason is but ultimately it doesn't matter, play the hand you are dealt, be compassionate and loving towards others and your life will be fine.  Don't judge a book by its cover, we all make our cover look pretty even if the book inside is a mess.  So be kind, empathetic and understanding because you never know what that person's day has held.  I recently was working in the drive-thru and a woman ordered A LOT of food which included chicken nuggets.  Well, the woman wanted to try all the sauces which means I would have to charge her extra, she said that is was fine and that she just needed the sauces.  Did this seem odd, yes, until she pulled around to my window and said, "Thank you for being so patient and kind with me, we had a death in our family today and we need junk food and no one in the car really knows what anyone wants to eat so we just wanted lots of choices."  It was such a little non-issue to me but I positively impacted her life on a not so great day.  When she drove away, I was so happy to be in my shoes and not hers.

6.  Stop thinking too much?!?!?!?! Whatever, 7 Cardinal Rules For Life, clearly you don't know me.  LOL  This I cannot change, my mind is and always will be moving a mile a minute.  Let's just call #6 a fail.

7. This one I need to work on because I know that I rarely smile at someone unless they smile at me first.  Not because I feel like I hold the weight of the world but I hold the weight of MY world which includes friends and family.  I need to learn to say no and to not always try to fix everyone's problems.  Sometimes I can but a lot of the time I can't and that just makes me disappointed in myself.  I think #7, is the most important one for me to work on, not entirely from the smiling standpoint but because it is not my job to fix everyone's problems but I really try.  I think that goes to the people pleaser in me.

Lots of food for thought here and what better time to better yourself than on the first day of a new year?  So in the words of Barney Stinson, "Challenge accepted."