I’ve been very busy lately, too busy even to blog or so I tell myself. But maybe that’s not entirely true, maybe I just didn’t have anything to write about.
I’ve been setting up a social media campaign for the charity I work for. The aim of the campaign being to raise awareness of the stigma faced by people living with HIV in Scotland. Its been hard work and I’ve learned a lot but that is all for another post. The reason I mention it is because I’ve been reading a lot of papers about stigma and lots of individuals stories about things they’ve had to deal with and I have to admit it’s often harrowing and always depressing so today I got a double boost and I thought I’d share it.
My first positive today was interviewing a young man who uses the services of Waverley Care. He told me how low he was when he first contacted the charity in 2006, how he thought there was nothing in the world for him, that he didn’t deserve there to be.
He continued to tell me his story, about the help and support he’d been given and how he’d enrolled in an IT course because he new nothing about computers and wanted to learn. Later he managed to get into an access course for university and has now been offered a place on a highly sought after course at a top university.
He said he still can’t believe what a long way he has come in such a short time and wanted to tell his story so that other people who may feel as hopeless as he did 4 years ago can see what can be achieved with some support. It was really uplifting to hear such a story and see him so full of enthusiasm and confidence. It gave my day a real boost.
My second boost is harder to quantify or reason. I was driving home from the supermarket and I passed two young boys in the street playing rock, paper, scissors. One picked paper over the other’s rock and the loser steeled himself and walked purposefully up the road, possibly to do some mischief (at least I like to imagine so).
Just why this gave me the warm fuzzies I can’t say, perhaps memories of childhood and the freedom to make decisions based on a game. Perhaps the thought of decisions with outcomes that are inconsequential enough to be able to make them frivolously.
Paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper but nothing beats the warm fuzzies!
Have a think. What did you see or experience today that gave you the warm fuzzies? It was probably something small and inconsequential that was quickly forgotten as you moved on with the big things but did it bring a smile to your lips just now as you remembered? I bet it did.
Photo credit: Gostalgia
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