What Happens to You Does Not Make You the Person You Are, How You Handle it Does.

My Nana has told me this life’s lesson so many times.  A person cannot always prevent unpleasant things from happening to them.  Bad things happen to everyone.  But one does have the power to control how they react to the action.  This life lesson is something Randy Pausch lived by.  Instead of looking at his cancer in a negative way, he did everything he could to help his family get through his death.  My mom’s family has put us through a lot of situations where we could have looked at things in a lot of negative ways, and generally my cousins’ mom did.   From all of these stories, I have learned that you need to handle as much as you can in a positive manner, or they will eat you away inside.  Nana has actually landed in the hospital several times due to stress.  One time, she went with my aunt to retrieve her belongings in Tennessee.  My aunt’s boyfriend was throwing big boxes of pots and pans at my aunt as hard as he could, and Nana couldn’t do anything about it.  They drove back that night, and the next day, Nana went to the hospital with a “broken heart.”

   Nana isn't the only person I know who has been effected by things that have happened to her.  At my birthday party one year, we did a lot of team games.  My friend Raychel just happened to be put on the same team as my cousin twice in a row and she made a huge deal out of it!  She started yelling about how the only reason she came was to get away from her annoying brother and that Luke was even more annoying than he was.  After that she ran into my room crying and we all had to go in and change the teams to get her to come back out!  She even texted me, "I'm so bored," from my room.  She was affected in a negative way by something as small as a team.