The Fortunate and Unfortunate Side of Change

In a previous blog, I stated the fact that change is inevitable, and it truly is.

The older we get the more we say ‘in our day we had respect’… and we realise what our elders were on about when we were kids. But with that scenario, it’s not about time periods, it’s about the deterioration of respectable youth; social media, easing of laws and growing intelligence are the three factors increasing naivety, stubbornness and rebellion among the younger generation every day. I mean…how far does it have to go until we have babies smoking, throwing eggs at houses and back-chatting?

But we can’t just blame outside occurrences for the way we act or the way we develop, although it does have a vast affect, we should also know how to act based on a given outside experience and the way we perceive them, this is getting harder and harder to control the more time goes on and the more we advance as human beings.

The Left Turn

Change comes in many forms, with positivity we look at change as progression, development, evolution, but we tend to forget the problematic side of change, the type of change that’s making us take a, left turn, most of the time.

Now, some of us handle this left turn well, some know how to keep hold of the harness on thought and the right way of life, but others either lose it or never had it at all for whatever reason(s).

The purpose of this blog is to influence right decisions and help people understand how to overcome negatives in your life and use them to make the right things happen.

A Brief Story of my Defining Moment

I had to leave home when I was about 15, when I was doing my GCSE’s in fact. Since then I have lived in many houses, apartments, bed and breakfasts…slept on many sofas and even had the pavement as a bed a couple of times.

As a teenager I was led into the wrong crowd, I was taking drugs, becoming emotionally unstable and was generally flushing my life away with all day and night parties inviting as many people over as possible to try and push away the fact I was so alone and all I wanted was an attraction of people to make myself feel wanted. But things got so deep, the drugs took over, I was acting strange and I remember sat crying in the flat two floors above being so depressed, overwhelmed with emotion and upset about my Mothers rejection, basically forcing me to leave at such a young age taking no responsibility, not caring what happened afterwards and the fact that I felt so alone and had nobody to turn to was just, claustrophobic. My friend that owned the flat two floors up didn’t know how to handle it, here was this teenager he hardly knew upset about the hardest thing in his life, I mean…can you blame him?

The morning after getting that explosive feeling out, not only did it take a weight off, but it also made me realise that anyone that doesn’t make the effort to be in your life, even family, should not make you that upset, that emotionally unstable, because you’re worth so much more than the ignorance it comes from.

Therefore it was that point, that life changing moment of realisation that I decided I can either make my life better every day one bit at a time, or I can take that left turn and just slide down that spiral.

So I shut everyone out, I locked the door, shut the windows, closed the curtains; it’s time to turn my life around. People were knocking to carry on the continuous party, but it was ignored, I remained with my stock of food for a while, kept myself to myself, and gradually the knocks got less frequent, I detoxed myself, made myself clean and eventually left that flat and I was back at college for a new start in my life, an intentional change.

This I would say is the defining moment of my life and the most important and necessary part of it that has got me to where I am today, that determination to prove people wrong has kept me going ever since. Now I have a much better mind-set and I feel like I know how to treat people correctly and considerably because of what I learned in such a way.

So what’s the Point?

This is my prime example of positive change based on negative experiences, it’s a great feeling for me to look back on hardship, to look at where I am today, how well I’ve done since that moment to change from a left turn to a straight road and knowing that I still have the rest of my life to do so.

But this wasn’t easy to say the least, words can’t express what my emotions were back then especially as a young teenager.

People overcome negatives like this every day in many scales, be it if you’re being rejected, if you feel alone, depressed… or more openly if you are struggling to reveal you are gay or you want to do things in the world to make it better because you empathise on the way the world is, it makes you angry and feel sorry for the less fortunate.

The point, although easier said than done, is to have a base mind-set of positive progression based on negative experiences when they happen, as well as creating positive outcomes from positive experiences, which is a lot easier than the adverse.

SO DO IT NOW

Take a moment to think about the bad things that have happened in your life, we’ve all had them. Think about the ones you reacted to in the wrong way, the bad decisions you made and the situations you got upset over, not just the ones you learned from and positively progressed.

Now take those moments, accept that this is normal and so is expressing it. Accept that this realisation should empower you to carry straight on instead of taking that left turn and potentially doing a U-turn unwillingly all together.

This thought process should hopefully make you understand that, you know what? Life is actually ok and will continue to be better and better every day as long as you make it so.

Using this will hopefully enforce you to remember, there are many people in this world and there are many that have a harder life than you do.

Re-adjust yourself, get rid of that unwilling indicator and accelerate to drive towards that moment you can look back in the rear-view mirror and think, ‘that was a bad experience, but look at me now’.

I hope this has changed the way you think, in whatever way that may be…even if it’s just a little bit, my work here is done.

Thanks for reading!

Craig Milton

#change #fortunate #unfortunate #realism #motivation #motivational #personal