An Attitude of Gratitude...

 

Grateful for yummy coffee, as well as "ME" time....

      Good Morning Loves! Happy Monday! I hope that you are all having a good day so far...I meant to write this post last night on gratitude, but by the end of the day my brain was a little fried so I decided to put it off till my thinking was more clearer. So I have been living in Hawaii a little over a month now, and I finally feel like myself again. You see, when I first arrived here I was excited to start a new life with my love...but after that first week it hit me; this truly was a challenge going out of my comfort zone. I broke down, and I fell a little bit into a dark place because my boyfriend would go to work and I'd be at home all day alone. Everything familiar was no more. My parent's house wasn't five minutes away where I could just drop in. My friends weren't a coffee date away. I couldn't just get up and drive to wherever I wanted because well...I didn't have a car yet. But after a few meltdowns, feeling sorry for myself, and sleeping way too much during the day to pass the long hours until my boyfriend got home I finally realized I had to snap out of it!

      I can't say what triggered it, but I just realized how good I really do have it. I have an amazing man who works hard everyday for us, and I am living in Paradise; literally. But that just goes to show you that it isn't outside things that bring us peace, it truly is within ourselves. And truth is there were things in my life that I wasn't happy with, but I was letting those things override all the beauty in my current situation. So I made a list. First, I wrote the things I wasn't happy with...

1. My weight gain over the past year, and most recently in the past few months.
2. Not having a car and feeling trapped.
3. Being lonely and missing my family, friends, and cat.
4. Lastly, feeling lost in a sense of having all this free time, yet not quite feeling motivated to start working on my career goals due to still feeling rejected after I was laid off back in June.

So I asked myself, how can I get out of this? Simple...try to make little changes daily to fix them. How? By being grateful for what I ALREADY had and use those resources to better everything.

1. My weight-I realized I could sit and wallow over this weight, or be grateful that this was my body's way of asking me to bounce back and tackle the true reason for my weight gain. Sure I could blame it all on my earlier diagnosis of thyroid disease this year, but truly I knew that I also use food to cope and maybe at 31 this was the final time in beating my dependence on it as a coping mechanism.
2. No Car-I didn't want my bf to spend money yet on one for me, because I thought I should wait until my Dad had sold my car back home so we weren't spending more money than we truly needed too. Yet he was offering me a car and so I realized how lucky I was to even have such an option.
3. Feeling lonely-This was truly in my hands, because when I get down on myself, I tend to push people away. So I realized that I was making this worse. So I started making more of an effort to face time, call, text, and send letters to loved ones. In turn, people reciprocated.
4. Feeling lost-Last, but not least I took back my power of letting the rejection of losing my job control me. After all, I had planned on leaving anyways to move here to Hawaii. And now that I have time to really focus on my writing and taking my time to follow my goals I need to utilize it! So I started watching and researching other bloggers that inspired me and it gave me that zest again that I was missing.

Slowly but surely, over the past two weeks I have started to gain perspective and realize how lucky I am. There is so much to be grateful for and the key is to stop focusing on what you are lacking, and focus on what you already have gained. So today I am starting in my journal

The space I made in my journal for my gratitude list each day.

a "30 Day Gratitude List." Everyday I am going to write 5 things in it that am grateful for. I challenge you all to join in on it with me. Even if you're going through really hard times with your finances, your health, and so on; there is ALWAYS something to be thankful for. You may not see it now, but you will. So today start your day with saying, "Thank-you."