Power of the Positive

I know a lot of you out there are hopeless Twitter-holics and Facebook junkies like yours truly, so I'm wondering something. Have you noticed how many tweets and status updates are negative? I have noticed this. Some people tweet/update negatively from time to time, some do it more often than not, and some hardly ever have anything positive to say. I started thinking about how it makes me feel to read constant streams of negativity, and realized it makes me feel, well, kind of depressed.

To clarify, obviously, no one can be all sunshine and rainbows ALL the time. We all need to vent sometimes, and if you have something bad going on in your life, maybe you want the support of your online friends to help you through it. Not a damn thing wrong with that. What I'm talking about here is those people who never seem to have anything good to say about their lives at all. I think that's sad. I've been a nurse for twenty-something years. I've heard some real-life stories that an editor would reject for being unrealistically angsty. I've seen people smile and hang on to their optimism through circumstances you would not believe. My personal theory is this: no matter how bad of a day you're having, if you have the mental and physical ability to type a sentence into Twitter and the computer/laptop/phone and internet service to send it out to the world, then you by fuck have something right there to be happy about, and a whole hell of a lot more than too many people in the world have.

Here's what I've decided. I've decided I'm going to resist the temptation to Tweet the negative (and it IS tempting; I feel the pull, believe me). I am going to do my level best to find the positive in every day and every situation and Tweet that instead. It elevates my mood to do so, and I like to think it maybe brightens other people's days a little bit too. Or at least doesn't add to the general depression *g*