Change your thoughts and you can change your world!

I'm staying at my parents house over the Christmas hols and rummaging through some of my childhood things, and I came across one of my old diaries. Reading letters from my 16 year old self is quite frankly making my skin crawl..I can't believe how dramatic, self absorbed, obsessive and whiny I was! For example:

Like most people, I've had my dark past. Growing up I had a lot of things to deal with both at home and at school, and I feel like I was a bit of an emotional tornado. I wore my heart on my sleeve and told everyone everything, I felt like I barely had a handle on my life and my brain was telling me "the more people you tell about your problems, the more advice you'll get and the more people will understand when you have a weird mood swing or an emotional breakdown". In reality all that did was allow people to walk all over me as they saw how vulnerable I was for not having a backbone, and also gave people something to talk about. In the long run it also meant I found it hard to trust people, and I spent a long long time feeling sorry for myself and blaming everyone around me for how I was feeling. Things went from bad to worse and I didn't know what I was doing, where I was going, who was on my side and who wasn't, and I kind of got a bit lost inside myself for a while.
I guess when you're in that dark place you're so overwhelmed with what's going on in your own head it's hard to see what's really going on around you and how you're coming across to other people.

I remember one day in particular I'd been pushed to my absolute limits. I was so angry I felt like I might do something stupid, I'd locked myself in the bathroom again so nobody could come near me, my hands clenched into fists, nails digging into my palms, heart beating so hard and fast it felt like it was going to burst out of my chest, teeth gritted so firmly together I was starting to get a headache...and suddenly a quote popped into my head which I'd read a couple of days before...

I thought to myself (being the dramatic teenager I was at the time), "Well everything is the opposite of alright at the minute!!" I didn't get it at first but as I calmed down I thought about it more, 16 is still so young, Id barely started my life and yet I thought it was all over! I took a long hard look at myself in the mirror, decided to get over myself, start being grateful for what I do have, and start changing my negative thoughts for positive ones.
I don't remember much of what happened later that day but I've just found this entry in my old diary:

I used to wish my future self would shake me by the shoulders and tell me what I was doing wrong so I could fix it, but I'm glad I went through all the negativity and came out the other side, because it's made me the optimistic happy person I am today. I've recently learned about the Law of Attraction, and I can see now that the reason I was so miserable was because I was looking for things to go wrong! Nobody else can tell you to change your thoughts, it's a decision you have to make by yourself, but the more positivity you look for, the more you find!

Once I decided I wasn't doomed forever, I discovered I was actually a better person than I thought I was! I'm currently running 3 businesses alongside Uni, one of which I'm in partnership with my best friends, in a long term relationship with one of my best friends, I build my vision and work on my self development daily, and I'm working towards a future of financial freedom, fun, and awesomeness for myself, my family, and my friends!

I hope that if you can relate to what I've been through, you can feel inspired by the changes I made and how it's changed my life. Finding cheesy quotes to cheer me up definitely helped! So I've included a few of my favourites below to make you smile :)