In my recent blog about Why do placements disrupt?, a reader commented … I miss the confident, optimistic, minimally cynical person I used to be.


I didn’t have a chance to address the comment immediately, but that thought has been washing around in my head, much like Pat Johnston’s comment that I answered in the previous blog.


Confidence, optimism, cynicism … where do I start? My confidence probably has suffered the least of the three, but there were certainly several years where I was too overwhelmed to even trust myself, much less expect others would trust me or have confidence in me. Now I am to the point where I know what I know and I trust my instincts and if others don’t get it, that’s fine … but move out of the way. That was pretty much my approach to the school about Dora. I didn’t want to fight them, but I wasn’t going to dance with them either. I was confident that I could back up my beliefs, and if they didn’t get the big picture, oh well. I am most definitely not the rattled, overwhelmed, PTSD puddle that they kicked while I was down ten years ago.


Losing my optimistic view and feeling cynical in my approach to many things … that’s the pits. I often think about how I felt when we learned some disturbing facts about Amy’s biology. I couldn’t decide if I should feel validated or depressed. Validated because it was becoming clearer why I had not had any more impact on her life or her behavior; depressed because the future looked grim indeed. I had tried to stay optimistic … if you don’t have hope, what do you have? But to hold out hope for change that can’t or won’t occur, is that realistic? Can we exist day to day, wishing for something that isn’t going to happen? Julie and I had this conversation today … we have altered realities, and the sooner we live in those realities, the happier we’ll be. I think one of the big keys here is to identify that which we can change, and that which we can’t. Some folks will call us cynical for deciding that some things we can’t change, but I call that pragmatic. If we quit trying to change something over which we have no control, we'll be much happier. If the "other party" decides to change, that's terrific. But WE can't MAKE them change.


I think our flagging optimism is because our optimism is still only our optimism … if the other player(s) in our game make poor choices, our optimism counts for very little. One can hope for the best, but after not seeing it materialize day after day, it becomes harder and harder to maintain an optimistic attitude, never mind apply an optimistic approach to other arenas in our lives.


We’re not optimists, we’re realists.

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