The Positivity Project, Explained

Like everyone else in the world, I did not have a wonderful childhood. I was raised by a single mother whose own mother was bipolar and tried to commit suicide while she was still in high school - to be fair, my mother never had a shot at getting it right with me. Money was always tight, questions about my father were discouraged, and she spent the entire summer between fifth and sixth grade sitting in the living room in her underwear crying while watching network television. She was crying because she'd lost her job; she was watching network television because we couldn't afford cable.

I spent my entire childhood plotting ways to escape. When I was four I packed a backpack with a few days' worth of underwear and declared I was running away, but I needed my mother to unlock the latch at the top of the door because I couldn't reach. I started dreaming of being an architect, and designing houses that I would design for myself, and showing them proudly to my mother, who would cry because she thought I was trying to guilt trip her for living in poverty.

There was always food, but there was little else. When my mother's teeth started falling out she had to save for a year before she could afford dentures - and then, two days before the surgery to have the rest of her teeth removed, she went to Target and spent her entire savings on storage systems for our apartment so we could "finally clean up and get on with life," which was something she said once or twice a year and meant exactly zero. Laundry was never done because there was no washer in our building, so we'd wait until we had absolutely no clothes left and then hike to the laundromat carrying it all in trash bags, because she had no car to take it in and no license to borrow someone else's car. Sometimes we'd give up and just wash everything in the sink, one miniature load at a time, and hang it up to dry in the kitchen.

Everyone told me the key to getting out was to get good grades and get a scholarship. I had perfect grades and out-of-this-world SAT scores, so I got a scholarship to USC during my junior year of high school (check out the program, it's wonderful: http://dornsife.usc.edu/resident-honors-program/), and promptly dropped out and moved across the country because Los Angeles was as far away from New Jersey as I thought I'd ever get. I decided to major in Economics and Mathematics, because I knew damn well that I wanted to make a lot of money one day, so I could support myself and rub it in my mother's face.

At USC I immediately discovered two things that shaped most of my college career. First: I was poor. I was really, really poor. My roommate wore $200 jeans and had her dad take her to the supermarket to buy her $500 worth of booze. Rushing a sorority cost $75, which I didn't have, but joining one would've been $3,000. Everyone had a car, and not just their grandmother's '95 Corolla that got really good gas mileage, but a brand-new 3-series their parents bought them to celebrate the proud accomplishment of passing the CAHSEE, which to those of you unfamiliar with the California public school system is the exit exam that all students must take before they can graduate and can be passed by most eleven-year-olds in other countries.

Second: Rich people feel really, really bad for me. No matter what emotional problems they had from their fucked-up childhood, they had never met someone whose bedroom ceiling fell in on them while they were sleeping as a child ... twice. They couldn't believe the suffering I had experienced while working after-school jobs since the age of 12 instead of hanging out with my friends. They enjoyed taking me out to dinners they knew I couldn't afford and driving me around in cars they knew I'd never been in before, and I enjoyed it too.

I have always been a pessimist. College only magnified the quality. I learned that being happy about something earned a shrug from everyone else, but that if I was about to have to drop out of school because I didn't send my financial aid application in on time, my friends would rally around me and find a way to make it work. I cringe when I look back at myself at 17, because I was really just a manipulative bitch. That is, until the negativity took over me completely and I found myself so depressed I took two semesters off school to sit around and contemplate how full of self-loathing I was.

So I came up with the positivity project. I have a wonderful, loving boyfriend who once delicately pointed out to me that every time we watched a movie, or went out with friends, or even talked about school, I had something negative to say. The movie was boring, Ashley was being a bitch, school is a waste of money because I'm never going to use any of this in real life. I even complained incessantly during a week-long vacation in Costa Rica.

I tried writing down ten things I was thankful for every day. I made an effort to make compliment sandwiches (compliment - criticism - compliment) instead of verbally shitting all over someone. I never tried affirmations in the mirror, because to me it's toeing the line between a last-ditch act to save your self esteem and being the crazy lady who tries to smoke cigarettes on the bus while yelling at the voices in her head. All in all I became a much more bearable person to be around, which is fantastic, but there was no method to it, no way to keep me on track if I started slipping.

Then my wonderful, loving boyfriend's little brother fell face-first off a balcony. For the first few tense days we did not know what was going to happen to him. Would he die? Have the mental capacity of a child for the rest of his life? Be a vegetable? End up with one of those weird personality disorders you can get from hitting your frontal lobe too hard and turn into an axe-murderer?

And that was when I finally saw the real, long-term, widespread effects of negativity. Before the police report was complete, everyone who'd ever known him had a theory about Little Brother's "incident," and they were not debating whether he fell or was pushed. They were debating why he was drunk in the first place. A broken heart! Bad parenting! Alcoholism in the family! His fraternity made him do it! Little Brother was not even awake and people were speculating that he jumped on purpose. Wonderful Boyfriend and I felt guilty for not noticing the signs (surely in these cases there are always signs?) and the parents were just very, very angry.

Then it occurred to me that Little Brother was going to wake up to a room full of angry people who had already made up their minds about what happened and why. Imagine getting hit by a car and waking up in the hospital to your family and friends yelling over whether you jumped in front of it, or were just too stupid not to get out of the way. I would imagine that if I woke up in the hospital after getting hit by a car I would just want a goddamn hug, and even if I had jumped in front of the car, I would probably want some help figuring out all the darkness behind that.

So I decided to blog. Sometimes it is too hard to stay positive by yourself, because life is overwhelming. But blogging forces me to stop and think, put my day into perspective, and reflect on it in a way I would never do on my own.