Free advice worth at least ten times that...

From Kirsten at Enjoy Every Sandwich (bonus: gratutious shout-out to Battlepanda for having such diverse sidebar links)

Perhaps a bit longer than the usual fair excerpt, this is a new wording for some age-old advice. The reality is your attitude and outlook on life are immensely important to just about everything. But can people actually change their outlook? People who have anger issues don't want to be told to chill, people who are hardcore cynics don't want to try to improve their attitudes, and people who are anxious don't want to let go of obsessions. Watch as the fiery profanity of Kirsten's diatribe speaks truth, not to power, but to the bullshit that resides in everyone.

Shit has a tendency to happen. Shit does not have a tendency to unhappen.

A lot of people, maybe most people, get handed a big sack of shit at some point in their lives. Often it's not their fault. It's sad shit. It's scary shit. It's shit that makes you mad. It's shit that if all were just and right in the universe, some fucking bastard would die a slow and painful death for over and over again. You have every right to hang onto that sack of shit as long as you choose.

I hung onto mine for a good long time. Near the bitter end of an eight-year relationship, my ex-husband did me the biggest favor of my life by saying something that really got me thinking. He said that I liked to be angry. I thought that one over good and hard. I didn't like to be angry, but it was my normal mode of operation. Why was that? I realized that I was focusing on being right, not on being happy. My parents, an ex-boyfriend, my ex-husband all wronged me. I was right about that, damnit! And boy was I pissed! P-I-S-S-E-D! And I wasn't gonna let go until someone made it right! But when I realized that the only way to make it right was for those things to unhappen- and that was entirely impossible- I rearranged my priorities. Instead of waiting around for my idea of justice to never happen and being very miserable waiting for the impossible to inevitably not happen, I decided to see about the business of being happy from here on out.

And I found that the trick to being happy was not to carry my sack of shit around with me forever.

We all have qualms, fears, preferences, or bitterness that keeps us from being happier. We call them mental baggage, because they're cumbersome as we tote them around. Kirsten reminds us that the reason we carry them is because we choose to, and that we could just as easily choose not to. The candor of this post is what works. Malcontents don't want help from Dr. Smileyface, so here's a colder truth that's undeniably evident. Is it truth enough to rival your precious personal baggage? It barely scratches mine. Still, I'll absorb what I can.