Honorable Mention - Wendy N. Landon, Age 27

Welcome to our Optimistic Essay category. Here you will find the $1,000 winning contest essay, 5 finalist essays and 15 honorable mention essays and a growing list of hand-picked select essays that readers submitted during our "Why Are You Optimistic About the Future?" contest. This is a special category dedicated to those who took the time to share their touching stories and bright perspectives with HappyNews.com.

I suppose the fact that I come from a family that put the "DYS" in dysfunctional would make my old high school classmates look at me and scratch their heads at the suggestion that I am an optimist. Back then, I appeared very "dark." You probably think I am exaggerating. As a teenager, I wrote woeful ballads about the horrors of my life, but now I look back at it all from an oddly amused standpoint most of the time. Years later, I realized that growing up, my writing was my therapy. Mine is the traditional American story I suppose—a young woman beating the odds; no one who knows me now can picture me in the life I once had. I am a licensed therapist, working mainly with troubled adolescents and their families. I come home to my little house in my quiet little neighborhood, relishing in the relative normality of it all. I educated myself out of the poverty and desperation. Oh, it's still there inside of me; I didn't just deny my roots as my mother would say.

Alright, I suppose I should just give you a glimpse of what it is I carry inside; otherwise, my point would be lost. I will present the cliff notes of my life. My mother was a teenage mother who was clueless about who she was and even more clueless about how to be a parent. To her credit, she was one of those rare ones at that time who actually finished high school, and no, my older sister was not born out of wedlock. My mother was properly married to my father, even if the marriage only lasted long enough to produce two children—my sister and myself. I suppose my mother just couldn't handle the boredom of a normal marriage because it was followed by a long series of abusive, alcoholic, drug-addicted men, who were not kind to us, to put it mildly. She had two more children after me—a brother and another sister. When my brother passed away suddenly, she adopted another son. Almost two decades after she left home, she finally got rid of the men, leaving really nothing of her soul, and therefore, nothing left for her children. By the time I reached my teens, I was financially and emotionally supporting my younger siblings in addition to my mother, who became increasingly unstable.

My first apprenticeship on being a Helper was living in my mother's house, where our family had one deep-seated belief that we held as the Truth—if Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. I learned quickly how to survive my mother's tirades. Amidst the constant chaos, I became my mother's cheerleader, her confidante, her counselor. I learned at an early age what exactly to say and do to make my mother feel better when she was down. I knew how to snap her out of the suicidal oblivion she often slipped into, and for every crisis that came our way, I always figured a solution to the problem. I believe that somewhere on my resume, the skills I learned growing up are listed there—"team player" (bails everyone out), "positive attitude and determination" (hangs on to hope long past reason), and "motivator" (strategically places a boot in the necessary parts PRN). When the rest of the family fell apart, I gracefully and firmly took charge of the situation.

To balance out this pitiful image of my family and childhood, I must confide that there were cherished moments as well, the nights my mother would come into my room and rock me to sleep, singing ever so softly so no one else could hear. She praised me and encouraged me to become a writer from the second I wrote my first "Roses are Red" poem, always telling people that I would be the next Stephen King. When I won the Young Author's Award in second grade for my children's book, Mom was ecstatic. She never doubted me for one second that I could "make something of myself" as she put it. She built dreams for me, even if when I didn't have my own. I clung to these moments like the scraps of a life boat that held me above water while I was lost at sea.

My father had a wonderful ability to stand back and analyze things from hundreds of miles away; he called it "objectivity." He always said that there are two kinds of people—the people who look at the world through shit-colored glasses and the people who see it through rose-colored lenses. I believe in my psychology classes in college they used a cleaner explanation; there were people who have an external locus of control—things just happen to me—and people who have an internal locus of control—I make things happen. If the world can truly be categorized so simply, at least 90% of the time, I truly have had an attitude that I control my own destiny. I don't think a person could make it out of hell without a sense of determination.

Being an optimist wasn't just a frame of mind; it was a borderline delusional survival mechanism. I had to believe that there was more to life than cuddling with cockroaches to ward off the winter wind whipping through the four-inch wide cracks between my bedroom floor and the wall. Before something can ever be, it has to be imagined, doesn't it? The recipe for happiness: Step One: Acknowledge one's suffering. Easy enough; this sucks. Step Two: Believe that one's suffering is a choice, based on attachment. I had to think outside of the box that I was raised in and see something different for myself. Step Three: This is where the optimism enters into the process. Believe that it is possible to change my reality and be willing to work for it. I mean, it wasn't like trading in my dingy old bike for a shiny new red one. It isn't that the reality of life changes; my luck didn't miraculously change one day out of the blue. It took years of therapy, determination, and faith for me to come to this point in my life, and it will take the same ingredients for each day of the rest of my life to maintain this peace.

I still see the horrors when I turn on the television. Unexpected and painful things still happen in my life. I hurt. I cry. I feel sadness. I feel anger. I feel bitterness. I am certainly not immune to loss, but I can either choose to cling to the trauma of it or recognize the blessings that remain in my life in spite of that loss. Then, when a little time has passed, I look at the loss to see what gifts it gave to me—strength, compassion, patience, humility. Because these gifts come without a beautifully colored package and a big red bow, they can be harder to see. At the end of each day, I appreciate the moments I smile, I love, I laugh, I hope.

Being an optimist is about choice and focus. It's about taking the good and the bad, accepting them, and then taking the good to lay a foundation for happiness. It's about having the entire range of human experience, and choosing to smile at the new adventures that each day will bring. I am optimistic about the future because I am a healthier and happier person when I focus on the blessings in my life. To really live, I must be open to living and not focused merely on surviving. I am an optimist because I have researched determination to overcome obstacles, and I know that when I channel my energy into my dreams, they do manifest themselves in my life. As I take control of my destiny, I have become a more peaceful and accepting person, and I have seen evidence that it does get better if you allow it to.