Reality Check: Not Everything Is "Hard"

There's a quote from Cheryl Strayed — from her completely wonderful, life-changing book Tiny Beautiful Things — that I keep coming back to: "There is no why. You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding."

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how much the words you tell yourself actually matter. Not in a manifestation-girlie, vision-board way, but in the smaller, more stubborn sense of where you choose to put your attention. Spill your coffee at 8 a.m., decide the day is ruined, and it usually obliges. Tell yourself you're lucky, and you start noticing evidence of it everywhere.

I recently came across a video from Natalie Buchoz, a quadriplegic motivational speaker who became paralyzed at 15 after a skiing accident, talking about what it means to wake up every morning and choose your attitude. Not a platitude, coming from her. Just a straight-faced argument that "any problem with a solution isn't really a problem," and that most of us have more than we're giving ourselves credit for.

I've always been a positive person — my friends would probably say to a fault — but I used to wonder if that was just my personality, some genetic setting I lucked into. I don't think that anymore. Infertility, chronic illnesses, losing my best friend at 31: none of it was a gift, except that all of it gave me perspective I didn't know I needed and couldn't have gotten any other way. The hard cards didn't cost me my optimism. They're the reason I have it.

You don't get to choose the hand. But you do get to decide what you do with it.