Friends, Winnie the Pooh, and How I Stopped Dramatizing My Life

How I flipped the tables on my overly dramatic life and became a zenned out bear instead.

Last week I shared about why I stop talking sh*t about my life.

If you missed that post, basically, my life was starting to look a little rough, and I was at risk of losing everything I had ever wanted (my family). Which is why I decided to get my act together and change the way I was speaking about myself, my life, and the people in it.

Spoiler alert: These rules eventually had to be amended when I realized that it’s really hard not to complain about people. Not only that, but there is a fine line between speaking positive and faking happiness — future posts on this topic are pending.

If the truth was that I was actually insanely happy with the life I had built, why was I constantly insisting on talking about it as if every moment of it was a really bad soap opera?

At the time, being the mom of two young children, they took the brunt of most my complaining.

If one of them woke up with a bad dream at 2 a.m., I used this as an excuse to complain the entire next day. Not to them per se, but to anyone else who would listen.

I was sure to tell anyone who asked me how my day was going that it was, in fact, not going well (due to my 20 minutes of interrupted sleep).

You might think it’s kind of ridiculous that 20 minutes of minor inconvenience could ruin an entire 24 hours — and you’d be right. However, I sure as hell found a way to do it day after day.

The good news is, there was always something to bitch about, so my supply never ran dry.

Kids playing with their toys and making a mess.

Teenager not talking to me as much as I wanted her to.

A new recipe not turning out like I’d hoped.

You’d be surprised how many uneventful moments in a day a person can spin into a Shawshank worthy tale. Trust me, I know. I was a pro.

At this point, I had made an intentional effort to never speak poorly of my husband, so he was usually in the clear. However, I was sure to share any mishap I could think of as soon as he got home from work.

Why? You might ask…

Because I didn’t want him to think I had done nothing all day.

I wanted him to know that my life as a stay-at-home mom was, in fact, difficult. (It was at times, make no mistake about that.)

But, at the end of the day, trying to prove to him that I was a hard worker were really just a deeper part of my lifelong attempt to keep him happy at all times. (More on how I stopped doing that here.)

The truth is, in order to change my life — and to stop making it so dramatic — I had to change the way I spoke about it. (Like I mentioned last week.) On top of that, I also had to shift the way I interpreted the events my life, which took a little more intention.