The Hidden Journal Pages vs a Community Wishing Well

While I was still working, I learned an important lesson: sometimes it is better to keep it in the journal. Complaining about negative comments will only elicit more negativity; celebrating positive feelings may lead to false expectations of recovery. Keeping it to myself, but expressing it in writing, always allowed me to create a history that I could refer back to and see that the dark days did indeed pass by now and then, but the sunshine most always followed.

I've read and responded to the Gratitude Journal posts here and there, and I do try to live a focus of positivity. But negative things do happen, and I record them in my journal. Sometimes my journal is a written page in a notebook: sometimes it is an anonymous blog post, and sometimes it is simply something that stays and simmers in my memory.

There are many among us 'PWMS' (people with multiple sclerosis) who might want to add to a Wishing Well post rather than a Gratitude Journal, and so I'm creating that Wishing Well here. Wishes are things we con't have but can't have ... like the power to change the actions or behaviors of other adults. Wishes are fantasies of which we might dream. When wishes become goals, they might become achievable, or might prove ultimately frustrating. Choosing to focus on the achievable is living positively.

Some of my wishes in the well are unachievable, and will remain fantasies in my dream world. Some of my wishes became achievable goals and they have added to the positivity in my life ... and could not have done so without some focus on my part.

Here's a fantasy wish: I wish more of my family would accept what I have accepted in my life, rather than expect what I no longer expect from myself.

Here's a wish that became an achieved goal: I wished to find a way to work happily during my retirement, and I am doing so now in my own quiltshop, where I interact frequently with intelligent, content, creative quilters easily pleased by the collection of fabrics that I share there.

And a wish that hasn't yet jelled as a goal: I wish I could feel more self-respect as a family member: my years of parenting are behind me, my grandchildren are within sight of their own adult years, and my parents have passed away never knowing who I really was and what I would finally become. My sisters are detached or deceased, my brothers the same. I am at the stage of my life that invites more remembrances than plans, but I continue to plan, and to set achievable goals that bring me peace and happiness. I tell myself that it is selfish to wish for more.

What are your wishes in the Wishing Well? Are they able to become achievable goals and bring you happiness, pride, confidence? Or are they wishes that will they bring only frustration as they are not things that you alone can make happen? Are they things that are best left in your journal, and not shared in the well?