I find myself being incredibly selfish sometimes. Well, a lot of the time actually. And the sad thing is that most of the time I don't even realize that I'm being selfish. I have this tendency to get all depressed and withdraw and wonder why I can't have this and that or the other.

Every day I'm blessed, but I always tend to find someone else who is blessed more and then compare myself to them. When I got into grad school, I didn't focus on getting in-- I focused on not winning a fellowship. So often I forget how lucky I am to have a job because I get so caught up in hating the office dynamics of the place I'm in. I become blinded to my blessings.

For some reason I've become very aware of this flaw lately, and I'm trying to do something about it. I'm trying to challenge myself to look on the positive side of things and appreciate what I do have. The things that I don't have aren't mine for a reason, and it's not my place to decide that I should have them.

What's that saying? "Life is what happens to us when we're making other plans" or something like that. Right now I'm not living my life the way I once envisioned it. I haven't reached many of the goals I somewhat foolishly set for myself. But those dreams aren't my life. This is my life. And it's a mixture of all sorts of positives and negatives, and it's my job to extract the positives and focus on them.

I admit- I tend to be a very negative person- so part of me doesn't even want to look for the positives. Why try to be happy in a world with so much pain and heartache? Somewhere deep inside of me though, I feel this little glimmer of hope-- that maybe if we focus on God's blessings and wish those same blessings on others (and not spend so much time worrying about ourselves and what we don't have) then maybe everything will be okay.

I don't know why I'm suddenly feeling something so optimistic, but I'm going to go with it as long as it sticks around.