  Ok Let's start again. By now I am in my early twenties. I was going in and out of meaningless relationships and was still searching for that last piece of puzzle to having a happy and healthy life. The answer seemed so close. I had managed to start reducing my anger somewhat and life seemed to have more hope. How was I doing it?
I had no clue. It wasn't till after I fell in love for the first time and went through a new hell I hadn't even imagined before that I really started to get closer to the answer. I was writing poetry at that time that dealt with how I was feeling and thinking during the pain. Although I didn't realize it at the time there was a direct correlation between the two; how I thought and felt. The pain of that relationship was to galvanize me in ways I can only now understand. I knew I never wanted to feel as down as I did during those times.
I started to slowly work my way out of the pain by taking steps to change my life. I met a woman named Linda during that time. Looking back, she was the start of my movement towards finding my answers. The relationship was just another in a long line of meaningless sexual flings of my early twenties, but the woman herself was anything but ordinary. One day I hope to find her and tell her the impact she had on my life just to thank her. Linda was a married woman with children that was separated from her husband.
Although she was a highly religious woman she found her spiritual self torn between her beliefs and her sexual attraction to a younger man - me. She saw things in me that I could not see myself. She pointed out that, contrary to my beliefs, I was highly intelligent and that I needed to explore that intelligence through college. I laughed at her. I was from a seventh generation piss poor family and knew I couldn't go to school. I was as ignorant as any street kid is today.
She calmly explained about grants for the poor and other ways the government helped out people like me. I hated being ignorant about it and was aggravated that some rich (she was a practicing psychologist which seemed rich to me at the time)woman could know more about the world than me. So I calmly poo-pooed her advice and ignored her as I moved on to the next woman. The thing is...her words burned in the back of head. They burned like fire. I started to question myself again.
Question where I got the idea that I was a second class citizen. Question where I got these beliefs about myself. Unlike most, I knew better than to blame my past. I had learned long ago that your past does not make who you are. You have control over yourself and your actions and you are not doomed to repeat things that happened to you. I wasn't my mother.
I was neither verbally abusive nor physically abusive in any way once I reached adulthood. So where did I get those idea? It was then it dawned on me that I gave myself those ideas. I told myself these things and therefore believed them just as I believed that food was needed for survival. You don't think to ever question yourself. It doesn't dawn on you to challenge yourself on such a basic level.
The idea was in my head now. Although I had a clue that I was the cause of some of my own ideals, I still didn't believe it 100%. I still wanted to blame others, since that is so much easier than believing that you could actually be so foolish. But even the idea was enough to start changes in me. Drastic changes. I moved again to get away from other negative influences.
I knew that I was still fragile in this new belief and that being around others that thought so negatively wouldn't help me pull out of it. Once I got to the new town (Melbourne Florida) I started looking into going to school. Seeing what money was out there for me. Seeing what I needeed to do to start. It was hard. So hard to try something so alien to me.
College wasn't a part of my family life. No one in my family went. I was completely alone at this time, struggling internally not to give up. Not to see school as some mountain to high to climb. Struggling hard to not think the word "can't". Six months later I enrolled in community college while I worked at a restaurant for a living.
Within a month I learned new things about myself and remembered some things I had forgotten. I remembered that I was adept at reading and languages. My teachers commented that I was a natural at science, humanities and English. I also learned something totally unexpected. I was a math whiz. Math came easily to me.
Something that wasn't the case back in my "can't" days. I started to gain confidence in myself. I started to map out a future for myself. I could see a future for myself. I started to believe that I created my own emotions. I controlled myself far more than I knew.
Shortly after I started school, I started seeing a woman I had fallen in love with almost a year before. She was the most radiant full of life creature I had ever met and she took my breath away. She had her own life issues as we all do, but it didn't matter to me. Here was a woman I wanted to grow with. Here was a woman I saw myself with 20 years down the road. Here was a woman I knew I would marry.
My Scottee Beth. Without going back into how I got where I am today. That last slow epiphany, changed everything about my life. Once I believed in it whole heartedly it helped Scottee eventually also to start understanding the same things. Many years later during a very rough time in my marriage, when Scottee was going through her own personal hell, a psychologist I decided to see reminded me of what I already knew, which is very necessary sometimes. I also found out that my epiphany wasn't unique.
The psychologist told me to buy and read a book by Albert Ellis that was written in the early 60's. It is called "A Guide to Rational Living". It was amazing to read all the things I had learned through my life. To see in words validation of my thoughts. It was also so necessary to remind me that rational living is something you have to work on every day. Something to have to remind yourself of all the time.
Something that you will fail at many times, but that if you succeed even marginally, you succeed greater than you can ever imagine. It will change everything about your life forever. The book went on to give many examples, some I could relate to and others I couldn't. I keep the book nearby and reread at least twice a year to always keep things fresh in my mind. Want to know the answer to being happy? You control your emotions through how you talk to yourself.
"You feel the way you think". When you stop beating up yourself for the mistakes you make, when you accept yourself as the fallible human that you are, you will stop having negative feelings about life and the people around you. Once you stop looking for the negative around you, you start seeing the positives and in doing so you become more positive and happy yourself. 1. When confronted by an event that can be interpreted in multiple ways, assume the most positive one. 2.
Understand that you cannot prove a negative. You therefore cannot BE a loser, BE a bad person, because at any time you could stop losing and stop making decisions that are damaging to yourself. Healthy positive thinking breeds healthy rational thought and emotions. 3. See and accept people as they are, if who they are is damaging to you, move on. If you can create a more positive atmosphere and therefore change the part of a person that is destructive, do so.
It's the right thing to do. 4. Don't get caught up in what people say. Look at people with all your senses. Hear then and see them. If actions don't match their words, be wary and refer to above statement.
5. Don't have unreasonable expectations of others. We are all human and we all make mistakes. Just because one behaves a certain way before it certainly doesn't mean that they will again. On the same note, understand that the world doesn't revolve around you, and that people will act in ways that you might not agree with. It's not the end of the world and it certainly isn't something to get upset over.
It's what makes the world a more interesting place to live in. Although I have no illusions that anyone will ever read this, I hope that someone does and that somehow it will make a difference in someone's life. Go out and find "A Guide to Rational Living" by Albert Ellis and read more of what I'm talking about. It's a short book and what do you have to lose? AJ 
