Happily Ever After: The Life-Changing Power of a Grateful Heart (26 page)

Remember that your story may not be your story alone. In sharing your struggle and the lessons you may have learned along the way, you open up the possibility of connection and action and transferred strength. You may not have a public forum as Giuliana Rancic did, but with a little thing called the World Wide Web and a whole new culture of bloggers, social media, and message boards, you can make an everlasting difference to just about anyone, regardless of where they are in the world.

Even if you don’t feel you have a compelling story to share, don’t think you aren’t able to reach out and touch someone. Just as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Everybody can be great . . . because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” We all are given the gift of time—even if we don’t feel that we ever have enough, while here on earth. Research volunteer opportunities in your area through sites like
DoSomething.org/volunteer
or
VolunteerMarch.org
. Depending on your interests and passions, you may actually meet someone who will change your life, or vice versa.

Unexpected Blessings

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.

—O
G
M
ANDINO

CHAPTER NINE

W
ITHOUT A TIME MACHINE, THERE’S NO WAY TO KNOW what the changes we’re experiencing now will lead to. I do, however, believe that everything has a purpose. As Marilyn Monroe once said, “I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” Known for dealing with significant inner demons of her own, Marilyn’s life on earth was not free from pain, and yet her words suggest that even she believed that there is a long-term deeper meaning to the events that occur in our lives.

A colleague recently told me that she once said, “Everything happens for a reason,” to an acquaintance, and the lady defensively snapped back at her, “People who say that have clearly never had anything bad happen to them.” The lady’s reaction seemed to imply that, to her, anyone who bought into that sentiment assumed that those who are the victims of bad things somehow deserve it. I imagine she thinks that bad things just happen for no reason at all.

For me, and it seems the late Marilyn Monroe, the phrase “everything happens for a reason” suggests not that bad things happen as punishment but rather that there is a deeper purpose for all life’s events, even if they are the most difficult thing we could ever conceive of experiencing or if their meaning is hidden from immediate comprehension.

That said, I understand that in some circumstances, accepting that there is a purpose to suffering a devastating loss can seem impossible, especially in the event that a life you have cherished has come to an end. As my friend Dana Weiss asked me, “How do you explain the death of a child?” When you’re in the midst of grief, you can’t. There is no explanation. There’s just pain and anger and profound sadness.

However, I choose to believe that we are all part of a bigger picture and that death, or any other type of suffering, has meaning. Whether it is revealed right away or decades down the road, or remains obscure until our own dying day, it does exist and when you acknowledge that, you are doing anything but dishonoring those who have passed and the struggles you’ve survived. In fact, by rising back up toward the light of happiness, you are actually doing your part to honor those who suffered and give value to what happened.

I may be standing at the top of my life’s mountains at this point in my timeline, but I’ve spent my share of time in its valleys, and wholeheartedly believing that everything happens for a reason has gotten me through each and every time. Whether I was experiencing depression or loss, betrayal or physical pain, believing that there is a reason for my hardships has always helped me over the hurdles. To survive the hurt, I had to believe that my darkest moments weren’t all for naught. They couldn’t have been.

As a self-proclaimed wimp who does not handle pain well, be it physical or emotional, I know from time to time I will falter from my goal of acknowledging the bigger picture. However, I do have a plan: to optimistically keep searching for meaning and gratitude and grace when I need them most. The bumps in the road teach us to be cautious the next time around, show us the depth of our courage and strength, and may even fling us forward onto a life path that we may not have otherwise chosen for ourselves: a path that is unexpectedly blessed.

I
T’S
A
LL
A
BOUT
P
ERSPECTIVE

My husband recently told me that he wasn’t a “glass-half-full kind of guy.” He said, “I prefer to choose the right size glass so that it’s always full.”

My response: You don’t always have the option to choose the size of your glass, but you do always have the option to choose how you view it.

As I’ve said throughout these pages, I attempt to look at life from an optimistic viewpoint (“attempt” being the keyword there). No matter what life throws at me, I do my best to look toward hope and a greater meaning bigger than myself. And according to two studies I found, if you do the same, you will be both more resilient and healthier.

In the first study, Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of Mount Sinai’s School of Medicine, examined 750 remarkable Vietnam veterans. For six to eight years, each one of these brave men was a prisoner of war, kept in solitary confinement and tortured. Yet unlike fellow war vets who hadn’t suffered such extreme treatment, they weren’t weighed down by the common
psychological consequences of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Charney wanted to know why they were so resilient. What he found is that the prisoners of war shared ten characteristics that allowed them to come out of their horrifying experiences without lasting mental injury. Included in these characteristics were social supports, humor, altruism, spirituality, the ability to face fears, being trained, and having a moral compass, a role model, and a mission in life. At the top of the list, though, was optimism.

In the second study, Christopher Peterson and his psychology colleagues at the University of Michigan found that, after studying ninety-nine graduates of Harvard University for thirty-five years, those who had a pessimistic style of describing life events at age twenty-five had significantly poorer health later on in adulthood than those with an optimistic outlook.

And if those results aren’t enough to make you see the brighter light of optimism, maybe you’ll listen to Martin Seligman. When asked to share the one piece of knowledge he would like everyone to know, the author, prolific researcher, and founder of positive psychology said, “If you are a pessimist in the sense that when bad things happen you think they are going to last forever and undermine everything you do, then you are about eight times as likely to get depressed, you are less likely to succeed at work, your personal relationships are more likely to break up, and you are likely to have a shorter and more illness-filled life. That’s the main discovery I associate with my lifetime.”

So, if you are ready to give yourself a better chance at living a healthy, happy, more successful life, join me in taking the bad with the good and weaving it together into the best.

A G
OLDEN
O
PPORTUNITY IN A
S
ILVER
L
INING

For much of America, when you hear the name Jenny McCarthy, you think of a witty, candid blonde who is a devoted mother with a huge fan in Hugh Hefner, a successful career in the literary and television worlds, and a very public advocacy for autistic children around the globe. At least, that’s what I think of.

I’ve long admired Jenny’s humor, beauty, and zest for life from afar—especially after reading her best-selling books about motherhood and becoming a mother myself. She has a fun-to-watch, outrageous personality and a love for her son that is both undeniable and inspirational. In 2003, I was lucky enough to spend a day with her on the set of
Less than Perfect
, and my years-long admiration couldn’t help but grow.

I was invited to do a cameo. A nervous wreck, I was way out of my element, but I decided to try to enjoy the opportunity I was being afforded in sharing space on a Hollywood set with comedians who made me laugh every week through my TV. Jenny had a recurring role that season as Dani, the best friend of the main character, Claude, played by the show’s star, Sara Rue. In the scene, Claude and Dani find me trying on wedding gowns in a bridal boutique—inspired by my real-life upcoming wedding. I will never forget how at ease I felt with the gracious and hysterical encouragement of Sara and Jenny, who must’ve been so annoyed with my complete lack of acting ability.

Sometime later, I became friends with Jenny’s sister Amy, who married my and Ryan’s friend Dan Hinote. Other than their wedding, I haven’t had any connection to Jenny except maybe appearing in a tabloid in the same week. She has been
a big influence, though. After seeing an interview with her for her autism organization, Generation Rescue, I found a wealth of knowledge on the website and proactively used it as a guide for individualizing the timing of my kids’ immunizations.

Much later, I happened to come upon a blog post Jenny wrote called “. . . And I Lived Happily Ever After.” Sound familiar? Even though I hadn’t crossed paths with Jenny in quite some time, she graciously granted permission for me to reprint her piece here. Read below for a sweet example of being given a reason to smile.

Circa 1980: When I was a little girl, I would walk around with my three Cabbage Patch dolls and practice being the greatest mom in the world. I was confident I would have three children and be married to Prince Charming and live happily ever after.

The images in my head of what my future looked like were so real to me that I had trouble differentiating what decade I was in. If time machines were real, I wonder if I would go back to 1980 to tell Jenny to stop that foolish dream? Would I tell her that she would be divorced, have only one child who would be later diagnosed with something called autism and be left to financially cover all of the bills and caretaking on her own? Probably not. I prefer surprises anyway.