I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, WTF, people like me.

So I did breathe my way into forty, wearing ridiculous but gorgeous Christian Louboutin heels that lasted about an hour on my feet. My husband threw me an amazing party with wonderful friends, great drinks and incredible food (thank you, Campanile.) Friends from high school, college, law school and my life in Los Angeles all came and we danced and laughed and I almost felt young-ish.

I felt like I had an important learning moment that weekend. We had been talking in Psych about how negative thoughts truly can affect your physical well being (raising cortisol, adrenaline, etc.) and how that is especially true in Fibro patients since we generally live in fight or flight mode anyway, with raised levels of all those hormones already. I realized that I have also often let negative thoughts run my life and a large reason for that had to do with my fear of not being thought of as intelligent. That doesn't automatically make sense does it? Well, in my twisted German, Goth mind, it did. I had come to believe that true intelligence is always distrusting and snarky and negative. Positive thinking, to me, was perky and fake and insincere and mindless. It seemed sad, actually, like the great Senator Al Franken's Stuart Smalley from SNL. I have also come to realize I have quite a problem with black and white thinking, so I cannot navigate the gray waters of life very well and am, therefore, trying to be more open to some of the ideas I have hated in the past, i.e., "positive thinking."

Positive thinking, I am starting to realize, does not require one to be skipping along mindlessly while giggling to oneself, not ready for the anvil to fall out of a clear blue sky. One can simply try to leave open the possibility that not all is evil and dark in the world. This has become both easier and more difficult since becoming a parent. But I have decided that, rather than anticipate the worst in every situation and look at everything through a lens clouded by pain and anger, I would give myself permission to just take things at face value.

I believe I have looked at the negative side of life because I have always wanted to be prepared for the worst. I like to play chess with catastrophe. I like to look eight moves ahead and see all the bad that is up ahead, so I believe I can prepare myself for it. Obviously, this is truly impossible. Saying it out loud or writing it down makes it seem even more ludicrous, but, in my twisted brain, it has always made sense. Besides making me a generally dark person, it seems it has also filled my brain and body with bad chemicals and hormones that may add to my pain.

So, my new plan is to take a situation and not just jump straight to the dark side. I will take a deep breath; I will look at both sides of the issue; I will tend to the "positive" side of the issue, because what is the harm in taking that side for once? Perhaps I will be unprepared for the worst because I haven't thought it all through to its horrible conclusion. But here's the truth, even though I was always preparing for the worst, when the bad things did happen, I was never really prepared. I wasn't steeled against the pain, physically or mentally or emotionally. In fact, it all seemed even worse because I had been expecting something bad to happen and, when it did, it just fueled my fury that the world was a bad place.

So now, I will take the sunny side of the street for a while and see what happens. It can't be worse than the stormy side.