You make promises to yourself.

You tell yourself that you can change things; that you can make things different, or better. You grab ahold of the think-positive-enhance-your-own-life self-help bullshit and decide to revolutionize your own existence.

For a time, you manage to convince yourself that things have, in fact, truly changed. Life is somehow full of sunshine and flowers. But when the thorns and the rainclouds hit, you are flooded with feelings of guilt.

What did I do wrong? you ask yourself. You sit in the corner of your mind and replay everything you've done to bring on such calamity. You try to find the justification for the tragedies; for the inconveniences.

After all, if this prosperity gospel, this pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps and get-a-fucking-grip philosophy works to make you better, it's gotta work to make you worse.

But that is never the part they tell you. Oh, those self-help gurus are all for fixing your life, but they ignore one basic fact: shit happens.

Shit happens to everybody. Sometimes it comes like constipation -- rarely and unsurprising. Other times it's like diaharrhea -- gooshy and non-ending and cramp inducing.

In our case, it comes in 3s: one to snap us out of complacency, two to piss us off, and three to drive home the point.

I learned a long time ago that it was essential to keep a negative perspective. Some people shoot that down. They tell me that I'm being a cynic or a pessimist. I am! I am choosing to expect the worse before it smacks me upside the head. I am choosing to keep my eye out for the mindfuck before it messes with my entire brain.

It's one thing to wallow in self-pity and misery, never expecting to get any better or to even try. It's another thing entirely to learn a lesson from life and refuse to get pushed around by it anymore.

So know this, boys and girls.

I don't buy into that self-help religion anymore. It's one thing to assume that your life isn't ever going to get better and to choose to live like that. But it's another thing to go running after every emotional pot of gold and psychobabble rainbow simply because you have no desire to face your pain.

B.