Subscribe
×
By Trish Arab
My friend Jen and I used to play a game - the "whose life sucks more?" game.
The gist of it was if one (or both) of us was having a bad day, we would state the reason why (our) life sucked more.
Pretty straight forward - nobody really won anything - except the ability to brag that their life actually was the suckiest - it was more permission to wallow in whatever thing was getting us down - failed job, failed romance, failed diet, etc. and usually ended in us finishing a bottle of wine and laughing because clearly if you have a friend who will play the "whose life sucks more" game and share a bottle of wine with you, neither of your lives actually suck.
We continued playing the game until my parents died - and then that would be the reason I gave each time, whether I was having a bad day or not, which in all honesty was not a fair game move on my part - but I've never really liked losing. :)
All joking aside, the game stopped when we realized that we had much more to be thankful for than to be upset about. I guess that comes with age, with experience. This week on "Coming Out The Closet" Patrick Cooper talks about just that, "getting over it". For him and his friends, part of getting over it, means allowing themselves a five minute pity party on whatever has got them down, and then moving on.
This episode really resonated with me, not just because it reminded me of the game Jen and I used to play, but because it felt like a pretty appropriate message for me to hear considering I had just told Hong that I couldn't write the blog post that he originally asked me for. It was too hard of a subject for me to cover, and I simply could not get over it - even though I sat in front of the screen for hours, trying my best to.
The episode was a good reminder for how I want to live my life - how I have tried to live my life. Maybe I'm not ready to just get over my inability to write about that particular subject, but I have managed to spend the years since playing the "whose life sucks more" game not letting anything really get me too down.
Like Patrick says in the episode, it's a choice we make to stay positive. Sometimes it isn't the easiest choice, but letting something weigh you down, actually takes the choice out of your hands, and I refuse to give away my power that easily.
For the full episode tap here.
