three problems we think we have but we really don't

“I’m sad [for no apparent reason]”

I am guilty of this one. You have a decent job, you have good friends, good family but yet you are sad because you have no one to hang out with on a day you feel like hanging out. This is me. I get sad when no one has taken me up on my offer to hang out and it sometimes leads to a domino effect of sadness. I’m sad because I have no friends, so I get sad because I feel lonely and don’t have a boyfriend or a husband or even a date and then I get sad because I feel like I don’t have those things because I’m ugly and fat. You see how this non-problem turns into a ridiculous first world problem?

“I’m angry [for no apparent reason]”

You have no reason to be angry unless you are living under an oppressive regime or mobsters have murdered your family or you’ve been a victim of a crime. Refer to “I’m sad” and replace the word “sad” with “angry” or even “frustrated.”

“I don’t have a choice”

I’m going to invoke a scene here from the movie, “Dangerous Minds.” In this scene, Michele Pfeiffer who plays the tough teacher at an inner-city gang dominated school tells her students they always have a choice. One of the gangster students replies that you don’t have a choice when someone is holding a gun to your head. Another student then says yes you do because you can either choose to scream or not scream when you die. Cue Music: Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.” That is profound—that’s right I said it. Even in the direst cases we have a choice. I’ve often found that when people (including myself) say they don’t have a choice it is used as an excuse to do something that could potentially cause a problem. It is true we cannot choose some of the people in our lives like our family and in some cases our co-workers, but we can choose how these people influence us. We can choose how much space we allow them in our life both physically and mentally and we can choose how to react to them. We can choose how we deal with tragedies and we can even choose how our enemies affect us. The point is 99% of the time we have a choice. It doesn’t matter what choice people make but just know that what people do is indeed a choice.