Optimism & cynicism.

Many people who have known me have thought of me as being cynical. In fact, I actually called myself cynical from the moment I learned it in third grade when we had it as a vocabulary word, where it was defined as "doubting the good intentions of others." However, many people have also considered me to be a positive and optimistic person; one of my friends even went as far as to say that I live too much in the land of "rainbows and fluffy bunnies" and need to be a bit more realistic sometimes.

So, after being called both optimistic and cynical, I'd have to say that I'm a bit of both. I'm cynical in the aspect that I do tend to be paranoid and suspicious about many things (although part of that could be attributed to the fact that I'm a New Yorker. XD), that it's hard for me to accept compliments, and that whenever I'm happy, I know that happiness won't last forever. At the same time, I'm optimistic because I'm grateful for the many wonderful people and things in my life that I have, and because even though I know that I'm not always going to be happy, and there will be moments in my life when I'm stressed or feeling down, knowing that helps me appreciate the happy and fun moments even more. After all, if we were happy all the time, how would we really know what happiness was? Going through difficult times makes the good times more worthwhile and meaningful in comparison, at least in my opinion.

I came up with this quote a few weeks ago when I was feeling sad: "If you ever need reasons to be happy, just think of each one of your friends." It's definitely a quote that applies to me, and I'm sure it applies to many others as well. My friends are really important to me, and just knowing that I have each one of them as a part of my life is enough to make me happy. Even if thinking about that when I'm upset may not always be able to completely fix whatever it is that's causing my sadness or bad mood, it's definitely enough to be able to alleviate it at least slightly, and remind me that no matter how bad things may get, I have wonderful friends who make my life better just by being in it and being themselves. (As corny as it may sound, it's true.) The way I see it, even if you only have one friend, that's still one more reason to be happy than if you don't have any at all.

Judging from this entry, I come across here as a lot more of an optimist than a cynic- like I said, I think I'm a bit of both, and I don't think there's a problem with having both qualities as long as they're in healthy amounts. Being overly cynical can be detrimental if you're constantly being suspicious of people and you can't learn to open up to and trust anyone, and being too optimistic can be problematic if you're so hopeful and assured that things will be able to go a certain way that you aren't able to look at situations from a realistic perspective.

I really wish I had some awesome way of tying this entry together and "ending it with a bang," as our teachers always told us to do when writing conclusions, but I'm actually really tired and probably should've written this entry when I was more coherent. >.> Still, though, I hope it makes sense and isn't too full of massive run-ons, haha.