It’s hard to believe after all these years I still have retained my optimism and my idealism. Especially getting past the last three years of the global pandemic.
Or even living in West Hollywood and Los Angeles County, how do you not get dragged down by things around you that are happening all the time. Just looking at the Citizen app and the website NextDoor — it’s a lot of bad news most of the time
I’ve also spent majority of my life avoiding people who are extremely negative. Which amazingly could be especially hard it today’s times.
I had one friend who would send out these emails as he was looking for employment and for some reason he grouped us onto a group e-mail that wasn’t even blind carbon copied so we could all see who was on the list.
And so I nicknamed his emails his “Debbie downer” emails and a mutual friend repeated it back to him and he was extremely angry.
But i wonder why he was angry because basically I nailed it. These emails were just really depressing and really sad and really negative. I think even today he doesn’t realize how negative he is. At one point I wanted to stop spending anytime with him.
So one day he says to me on the phone “we never get together,” and my response was “I know.” Because that’s all I could say and that’s all I meant.
If you seek out really positive optimistic people to be around all the time, your life will only get better because they will support and uplift you.
There’s a female friend of mine, and she was always really really negative. So one day I asked her “do you think you’re a positive person?” and she responds back, “yes, I am one of the most positive people in the world.”
I almost burst out laughing because I couldn’t believe this is what she thought she projected. And then I just started to think she must be really delusional because I know two other people that know her and told me she never has anything nice to say.
But how do you surround yourself with positive people? How do you seek out the right people and the right crowd to be around?
Social media has made it easier because you can see who all the whiners and complainers in life are. They always have bad news to post — versus the people who posts really positive uplifting things. I’ve had to unfriend a bunch of these sad sacks.
In life I had to be careful who I would tell people what I was working on or what I was doing because the last thing I wanted was someone to respond back with something negative. So you learn to be vague at times or say something in a generality to avoid getting something negative said back in response.
So being optimistic and positive is probably one of the most important things you can seek and be, especially in these times.
I think one of the most illuminating things is when I’ve told someone good news about something that just happened to me, and then they don’t have any response, or they ignore what I said. I suddenly realized, boy, they can’t even be nice and supportive. And they’re exactly the type of person I don’t want to interact with anymore.
JEROME CLEARY is a columnist for LAMonthly.org and for the LA Independent. Formerly a blogger for AOL’s Patch for West Hollywood, his work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Advocate and Frontiers Magazine. Jerome lives in West Hollywood and has been named a Local Hero of West Hollywood by LA Weekly. He can be reached at jeromecleary@aol.com.
