How I Became an Optimist
Say what you want about optimists (they are so annoying), there is an undoubtable advantage to a positive perspective.
I didn’t always feel this way — in fact, most of my life I was keen to look on the downside. It will come as no surprise then that I primarily felt anxious, jealous, and depressed. I would often observe my peers in awe as they rolled with life’s punches in an easy-going almost annoyingly optimistic way. I yearned for a chance to don their rose-colored glasses, just for a day, to see what they saw and feel what they felt, and yet, the more I wanted to be like them, the worse I felt about myself.
Admitting that I was not an optimist left little room for me to be anything but a pessimist. If I couldn’t dance in the sunshine with flowers and rainbows while befriending butterflies and puppies then it had to be all bad all the time. This is where I discovered my favorite cognitive distortion: catastrophizing.
If things were a little bad, I made them a lot worse in my head. If there was a small problem, I made it the end of the world. Pretty soon, my external reality was bad enough that it matched my dark internal existence. The storms in my head became the stories of my life — and I didn’t like it. Validating my suffering with experience was not only unpleasant, but it was totally unnecessary. When I turned my life into a raincloud, it didn’t take long for it to affect other people and soon, I had no more parades left to ruin.
I would be lying if I said this was my turn-around point and a wake-up call, but it was not. I was not yet ready to surrender my pessimistic identity and doubled-down on my outlook that the world was unfair, people were out to get me, and things were just never going to work out for me. I truly believed this. And the more I believed it, the truer it got. It wasn’t until years later that I ever even bothered to question if this strategy was working for me.
I will always remember the moment it dawned on me that maybe being a pessimist wasn’t serving me well. I was alone, living in a tiny basement apartment on the outskirts of Toronto, sitting on the cold cement floor, rocking back and forth while singing my familiar tune of “Woe is Me”. My two dogs sat huddled in their crate trembling and wide-eyed when one suddenly turned his head to the side in curiosity as if to ask, “Is this really helping?”
“No, wise little Yoda in a dog-body. It’s really not.”
But I couldn’t just stand up and step out of the pessimistic identity that I had been rehearsing for so long because, in many ways, it had become my armor. Without the defense of pessimism, I would have to face myself and take responsibility for the thoughts I entertained and the toxic beliefs that I tried to reinforce with my stories.
If I was finally preparing to shed my skin as a pessimist, I couldn’t quite flip the switch on optimism. I spent a long chapter in what I boastfully and almost snobbishly defined as realism, which was more helpful than pessimism but treads a very thin line from it.
Realism was like having one toe in each pond, which you would think would keep you centered and grounded but really, it just kept me stuck. Unable to fully commit to either/or, I often found myself exhaustively stuck in a middle ground that never really processed anything correctly and often left me confused about how I actually felt.
Still, there was no way I was prepared to look at the world and just see roses and rainbows.
“Look at the reality!” I would think.
It’s dangerous to deny the truth and the truth is often ugly. This was my belief that kept me anchored in realism, as unsatisfying as it was, until one day, I asked that same old question.
“Is this really helping?”
This time, my answer was a lot different. While it wasn’t hurting in the sense that it was not making things worse, it was hurting by holding me back. It was keeping me from a bigger life. I was playing small and safe because the realist in me would weigh heavily on statistics, on what ‘people like me’ might be able to do with their lives, on the expectations of others. And I was so sick of it.
Several years down the road, I began to understand what optimism looks like in practice. Perhaps it was through maturity, experience, or just a whole heck of a lot of turbulence but I began to understand that the more optimism I applied to change, the better I felt about my outcome.
And that was the shift. The average outcome never actually changed much. Disasters still happened and tragedy still struck — but I didn’t feel like these were actual disasters or tragedies.
When I was a pessimist, a negative event was a direct infraction to my personal self-worth. It significantly worsened the way that I felt about the world and in turn, myself.
When I was a realist, I would often outsource my emotion to comparison. They have it worse, someone else is suffering more, etc. Not only did this not make me feel better, but it also often made me feel guilt or shame for feeling upset in the first place. Realism never gave me the space to find or be myself in the experience.
As an optimist, I gave myself permission to believe in my potential and in my ability to figure it out.
I don’t know a lot, but what I do know for sure is that nothing stays the same. Bad times become good, good times go bad, and for better or for worse, everything changes.
The way I see this now is as an opportunity. An opportunity to grow, to get better, to improve, to learn, to level up, to become better prepared, and best of all, to appreciate the fraction of goodness that exists in this very moment, now.
What tomorrow brings, I sure don’t know, but the very fact that it might just be a little worse than today makes everything about today that much more enjoyable. And if tomorrow is even better, then I’ve already set myself up for a win.
That seems pretty realistic to me.
