Positivity
Despite several aspects of my life being overwhelmingly negative recently, I’m trying my best to stay as positive as possible about everything. Especially in regards to my job, and constantly being on the lookout for new employment opportunities. I think one of the best motivators of staying positive is guilt, because I don’t have it that fucking bad and I should just stop bitching so much.
There are a lot of wonderful things happening in my life now also, but for a while the bad was outweighing the good. It’s amazing how much control we have over the situations in our lives and how easy it really is to adopt “mind over matter.” I live with my best friend in the entire world, we’re saving money for an awesome apartment in an active, artsy nook in the city, and I’m generally excited for what the near future brings. I just had to kind of kick myself because a.) I won’t rot in this nightmare job forever, and b.) I won’t be financially dependent on others forever either. It’s also amazing how caught up we get in our own world and our own pity parties considering how good most of us have it. I’m a happy, healthy person, I care about people and life is good.
All the negativity has had me thinking about past experiences and how they’ve shaped my abilities to overlook the not-so-pleasant aspects of daily life. I’ve worked countless menial jobs in my short professional life, spending the majority of my waking time working for low wages, no benefits, and for someone else’s profit. Perhaps it was my comfortable lifestyle growing up that contributed so much to my vehemence against manual labor. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hard worker about things I have a passion for and for when something just needs to be done. I am not however, a hard worker when my task is to clean the 3 day old crust off of a rolling hot dog machine. I’ll do it half-assed, complain about it, and probably be bitter about it for at least an hour. Hey, at least I admit my downfalls. Point is, I had to kick myself in the ass and right out of whiny-lazy-childish mode.
Anyways, I thought about a certain nursing home I worked at for several months in high school, and how even though I worked there for only a short time, I remember it vividly because of all of the things I learned about people and myself. I have two stories about two very similar people, yet on opposite ends of the positivity spectrum.
Margaret was a 55 year old woman who spent her days scrubbing pureed sausage out of plastic cups in the nursing home’s kitchen. Margaret was one of the most sincere, kindhearted people I’ve ever met, while at the same time being really hardcore and positive. She’d go out of her way to make your life easier, but she wouldn’t think twice about verbally kicking your ass if you stepped out of line. She was bright, upbeat and had a knack for handling the grumpiest of the nursing home residents. Margaret was weathered by the business of living, and she knew that being negative was no way to go through life. She knew that if she hated her job and didn’t make the best of what she had, her finals days would be filled with regret and what-ifs.
Mrs. Shaw was a 78 year old resident of the nursing home, and like Margaret, was also weathered from the business of living. STNA’s and nursing assistants in her wing had taken to calling her “The Claw.” The difference between them was that Mrs. Shaw was bitter, angry, verbally abusive to staff, and generally just hated everything. Understandably so, considering how nobody really wants to go rot in a nursing home until they die. Mrs. Shaw was healthy and lucid, so she wasn’t just angry because she was senile or crazy, so I spent a lot of my time there trying to win her over and let her know that not everyone was against her. I’d slip her an extra piece of her favorite dessert, lemon meringue pie, or I’d visit her during my lunch breaks to try to at least make her feel like she had a friend, SOMEONE she could talk to and confide in even if she hated my guts. No matter how hard I tried, Mrs. Shaw was impermeable and refused to let up. I stopped visiting shortly after one afternoon when she screamed at me, but I gave it my best shot. I was kind to her even when she threw things at me, but I guess some people just can’t accept kindness.
On my last day working at that nursing home, Margaret said to me while elbow deep in low-grade liquid meat products, “Make the best of what you have here and now, or you’ll end up like Mrs. Shaw over in the north wing.” She had apparently also tried unsuccessfully to win over Mrs. Shaw.
The point is, kids, is that if you take after me and fall into pity-party-ruts about how awful you have it, let’s all take a cue from Margaret and make the best of the time we have, look forward to the future and be kind to others, lest we end up tossed in a nursing home, bitter and miserable because we didn’t live life the way we know we should have.