People see their existence through a variety of tinted perspectives. These perspectives work like mirrors and glass. The glass reflects experience, background, genetic inheritance, psychological make-up, personality type etc. Some are relentlessly positive in the face of impossible odds. Some even have their religious belief strengthened by terrible events. Others can only see the bad in everything and expect the worst. Their expectation is usually confirmed. Others still, think themselves objective and just ‘take it as it comes’ apparently neither up nor down with the flow.

Me? Well I have morphed into Mr Negative. My perspective, my tinted glass is such that if I could draw a line on a graph that followed the course of my adult life from positive to negative then that line would be a straight one. In outlook I seem to have gone from being predominantly a positive person to the opposite. In the past I was more likely to see the good in others and appeal to their better natures almost to the point of ignoring their dark side. I seem to have gone from that enviable position to one of being entirely steeped in negativity.

I remember the transition happening. It wasn’t of course that previous to that bad things never happened. It was just that they started then to be dominant in my mind. The negatives realities seemed to well up strong, demanding more and more attention and slowly, in drip-drip fashion, began to take precedence until after a while I was left with very few positive inclinations and impulses of any kind. Now, where positives do still exist at all, they have no sooner presented themselves than they are set flying by a whole lineage of negative processing rendering them impotent and so useless as an aid to any action.

Surely it can’t be that this is somehow normal and happens to everyone. No doubt there are those who would want to tell me so - the ‘get over it’ people, ‘shit happens’ and all that. You dust yourself down and get on with it. And that I certainly do, I never give up the fight. But I can’t see that the majority are ordinarily similar, like they are just as generally negative as I am but are valiantly pushing forward. Or could it be they do feel things similarly but are not so phased by that, saved in some way by their cynicism and low expectation? Is that it? Was my expectation too high? Was I not cynical enough when starting out? Whatever the case I am certainly paying for it now.