At the end of college, I thought I had finally begun to figure life out. I had a boyfriend who suggested we get married, and I had a political job in Indianapolis that paid twice what a teaching job would have paid. I felt empowered and excited.

Then it all fell apart. My job was a disaster–I was not cut out to manage budgets and juggle politicians and shepherd a new community center.   My schedule was a blur of meetings, ongoing fights about funding, and I was miserable. Much of the time I was depressed and this profound sadness leaked into my relationship. Then my Purdue boyfriend who had headed to Milwaukee for a job, broke up with me. Unexpectedly.

For a while nothing made sense. I had lost my relationship. I hated my job, and even worse, I hated my outlook. Who had I become?  I sulked around for a time, and then I did what I have always done. I began journaling, and I could see the problem. I wrote about the budget fights and the snarky mean girls in my office. I wrote about the mayor’s assistant who took me to lunch and promised me a job in Washington D.C. with our new senator if I did what he asked—but I wouldn’t. I wrote about the city truck that accidentally backed into my Chevy II in the parking lot, crunching the front and leaving  it inoperable. Every sentence felt wrapped in my anguish. In pain.

Many years later I would learn from Barbara Frederickson’s research. A guru of positive psychology, Fredrickson discovered that we need a positive ratio in our thinking to flourish. You need three positive thoughts for each negative one. I love how she shows us that negativity is a part of life, but that embracing the positive is going to enrich it. I wish I had known this at age twenty-two, but for a time my body was afloat in all things negative. At least, I knew enough to turn to books for help during this difficult period. I returned to Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl and was reminded that I was choosing my destiny. My meaning. It helped my head begin to clear. Then my dad had to read a copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking for work. He offered it to me, and I read it.

While I believe it was packed with good advice, there is only one thing that I can honestly say stuck with me. Peale urged readers to destroy the “little negatives” that surface in our heads. Obliterate them.  I liked that and began to practice consciously erasing negative thinking. When I had a negative thought, perhaps the image of the plane I was boarding crashing, I would consciously put a mental “X” through this idea. I practiced this all the time, totally unaware that I was starting to rewire my brain to think differently. You can see it in my journals. When awful thoughts or fears surfaced, I literally marked them out and replaced the thoughts with something uplifting. When I wrote “I am afraid of leaving my job,” I crossed it out and wrote, “I want work that feels meaningful. That helps others.”

Within a month I resigned from my city job. I decided to teach. Out of nowhere, my mentor professor from college, Dr. Barth, called me to tell me about a local teaching job he thought I should take in Noblesville. I signed the contract a week later.

Leaving a job steeped in political turmoil and negativity lifted the veil of depression and revived me. I suddenly felt in charge of my life. Growing into a new me. Even better, teaching allowed me to feel creative and uplifted by the energy of seventeen-year-olds. Intuitively on the first day of that job I knew that teaching would be the most meaningful work I would ever do.  It was!

What about the boyfriend? I shed a few tears when he broke up with me, but I was juggling a lot of pain, and I would later realize he was not part of who I wanted to become. I needed to grow up and find myself. Now I am grateful he moved on without me. I was able to find a new way of seeing the world.  A new perspective. One that led to my independence, and a happier, more fulfilled me.

Sometimes new perspectives are thrust upon us. Sometimes we have to persist to find and foster new perspectives. But whatever the journey, shifts in our perspectives tend to leave us more flexible, more understanding, and more resilient as we face a world that can be hard.