An Introduction, And Some Ideas On Not Sweating The Small Stuff

My name is Vivian, and I'm 20. And lucky to be 20. I'm sure this is just because of my perspective but I feel that I've lived many lives in just two decades and in layman' terms, "Seen some shit". I've reached a state of gratefulness for everything, all the things I've experienced and seen, even the really bad ones. I've come to understand that everything leads to something else and you'll hit good stuff and bad stuff as you go.

I grew up in Southern Ohio, with moderately poor parents (we could afford rent sometimes, but sometimes we'd have no electricity) and well-off grandparents. Those grandparents saved my ass on more than one occasion. Looking back, some of things would be easy to see as "unfair " or "problematic ". Like the time my parents told me we were on vacation but we were actually sleeping in a tent in the back of one of my grandparents properties to avoid paying rent anywhere. Or the time I found out my dad wasn't my dad, and that my real one was too drunk to care I existed. There's plenty of other things but they're not thins you share with strangers. These things bothered me very badly for a long time, and created a lot of issues with how I saw myself. I got worse and worse and darker and more sad until I got tired. I was tired of feeling like a waste, and tired of feeling unloved when I knew both of those things were untrue.

Anything can seem really big if you let it, but if you tell the big things that they are small and they will not become consuming, you'll start to believe it. It'll become easy to not sweat the small stuff.

I strategically took my profile picture so that you could see the giant ink stain on my bed. Just minutes before while I was painting out the sign, one of my four dogs knocked a bottle of India ink over onto me and my bed and my clothes (god bless my all black wardrobe). It would be easy to be upset at him for ruining my mattress and staining my hands right before work,. Instead I chose to clean up the ink flood and laugh about his clumsiness. It's entirely too easy to let every small annoyance turn into a bigger and bigger one. The ultimate goal in this life is to take care of other people, and then yourself and you can't do that if you're worried about an ink stain or even about where your alcoholic biological father could be hiding. You have to let yourself move forward and focus on what is important.

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
-"The Little Prince", Antoine de Saint-Exupèry

The Dog In Question, Jet Matthew
(Pictured below , His Merry Band of Miscreants , -1)

The -1, Jade

(P.S. I sure hope the Steemit Community likes dogs, cuz I'll be posting a lot of them)