The last several months life has thrown me some major curveballs that I frankly never saw coming, and those curveballs have caused me to have to deal with things I never expected to go through. As each of them hit I felt completely unprepared to deal with the mix of emotions hitting me all at once from what felt like all sides \u2013 feelings of shock and disbelief, sadness and profound grief, worry and fear, hopelessness, and an entire slew of other emotions that caught me completely and totally off-guard, making these last few months some of the most emotionally challenging months of my life.<\/p>\n
Yet with all the difficult challenges I was going through, l knew that the simple fact remained that the sun was going to come up again every morning, things were still going to need to get done, life was still going to have to be lived, and I was going to have to force myself to continuously put one foot in front of the other even though at moments I didn\u2019t think I had the strength nor desire to.\u00a0 I knew I was going to have to find a way to get beyond all the emotions, face circumstances as they were, figure out how I could best deal with the circumstances I\u2019d been given, recognize that while I couldn\u2019t change the difficult circumstances I could still make a decision to choose to be happy – I could choose to focus my attention on trying to be the best \u201cme\u201d I could be and then choose to have faith that somehow, someway, and at some point (whether it be in this life or the next one) God would make it all okay.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not going to pretend it was easy for me to choose to be happy, and I\u2019m not going to pretend that it was just a one-time choice where everything suddenly became hunky-dory after I made it because that wouldn\u2019t even be close to being true… The truth is that over the last several months it wasn\u2019t just a daily struggle to choose to be happy, it was often a minute-to-minute battle where I literally had to force myself to remember that I did, in fact, have the ability to choose to be happy. And there were even a few days when I lost that battle and fell to pieces, but with each new sunrise came another opportunity to pick myself up and choose to be happy. And I discovered that for every day I was able to choose to be happy, in spite of the circumstances, I felt myself becoming stronger, more capable, and at peace.<\/p>\n
I share this because I know that I\u2019m not the only one who\u2019s had to deal with curveballs in life (and I recognize that so many are dealing with curveballs much worse than my own) but no matter how different our curveballs are, the one thing for certain is that it always helps to know we aren\u2019t alone in our struggles\u2026 it helps to know there are others who understand how hard it can be to remember that happiness is a choice we can make\u2026it helps to know we aren\u2019t the only ones that get overwhelmed and fall to pieces once in a while\u2026 and it helps to know others are finding a way during tough times to still make the choice to be happy.<\/p>\n
While we may not be able to stop curveballs from coming into our lives, we can always make the choice to be happy.\u00a0 BE HAPPY!<\/p>\n
~Amy Rees Anderson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The last several months life has thrown me some major curveballs that I frankly never saw coming, and those curveballs have caused me to have to deal with things I never expected to go through. As each of them hit I felt completely unprepared to deal with the mix of emotions hitting me all at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[395,4697,9453,1966,15666,15672,15667,1759,178,15670,15671,29,55,4858,4273,231,103,15669,15674,14770,464,64,1109,35,596,15673,707,14776,349,1662,2479,775,15668],"class_list":["post-8645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amy-rees-anderson","tag-at-peace","tag-choose-to-be-happy","tag-crying","tag-curveballs","tag-dealing-with-difficult-things","tag-dealing-with-hard-things","tag-difficulty","tag-faith","tag-fall-to-pieces","tag-falling-to-pieces","tag-god","tag-happiness","tag-happiness-is-a-choice","tag-hard-things","tag-hope","tag-hurt","tag-in-spite-of-circumstances","tag-it-can-only-get-better","tag-it-gets-better","tag-joy","tag-life","tag-loss","tag-love","tag-loved-ones","tag-more-capable","tag-new-day","tag-new-opportunity","tag-peace","tag-sadness","tag-stronger","tag-struggles","tag-we-can-choose-to-be-happy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8645"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8648,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8645\/revisions\/8648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}