From the age of twelve, when I became The House Wife for a family of six, and hated every minute of it, I thought about killing myself. Actually, I'd been mulling over suicide before then. I remember my fifth grade teacher, who I liked very much, saying that people committed suicide because they couldn't accept reality. I recall thinking, "Why doesn't anyone consider that maybe they just want to know what it's like to die?" A lot of my life was thinking about death, and I did make an attempt at fifteen.
At seventeen I got hopeful, because of attention given to me by my Sociology teacher, who would later become my boss and then my boyfriend. Because I felt hopeful that I could actually have a somewhat good life and maybe even be happy, I wasn't quite sure my ongoing thoughts of suicide fit anymore. I was tired of those ongoing thoughts. I distinctly remember thinking, "I either need to kill myself, or stop thinking about it." That was a turning point. I was tired of being tired of life. I started seeing a high school counselor the following week, and things got increasingly better over the years, then decades, that followed.
Some fifteen years ago, I attended a small weekly "study group" that discussed the Conversations with God books. (We were all amused that our group was about discussing the books but we didn't discuss God. It wasn't a religious series of books and we weren't a religious group.) One thirtyish member revealed that he'd been extremely pragmatic as a child. Then, sometime in early adulthood, he decided that he was tired of his own negativity. Something I could well relate to. So, he left all his pragmatism behind by Deciding he didn't want to feel that way anymore and started doing things to help himself get happy, including spiritual reading.
One of the participants in the hugely popular The Secret documentary was the Reverend Michael Beckwith. I listened to some CDs of his back then, and one anecdote I particularly remember was him telling of playing volleyball on the beach with members of his congregation. At one point, a member pulled him away from the game, desperately needing to talk to the Reverend about his situation. The man went into a story about all the ways others had wronged him and then "suddenly he stopped," Beckwith revealed with great amusement. "He was so sick and tired of his own story, and explaining over and over again about how he'd been wronged, that he realized he didn't want to continue." Things got better for the man from that point forward.
The Abraham-Hicks philosophy addresses directly the idea of life stories full of woe. "If you don't like the way your life is going, then stop telling the story of how your life is going. Start telling a new story of how you want your life to be, rather than the old story of how it is." That works for me. When annoying things happen, I rarely even bother relaying such to close friends. I want to look forward to something better, rather than regurgitate something that didn't feel good. It's such an easy choice when you know that there is indeed a choice: Feel Good. Or Not.