☀️ The Nicole Magnusson Newsletter

A dose of empowerment and positivity delivered to your inbox every morning.

📆 Daily Issue 1 | ⏱️ Read time: 3 min

Stay Positive

_{Good morning beautiful soul! Here is a bit of positivity and background on why I started this blog. :)}

I’ve been going to AA meetings religiously for the past month. I don’t have a problem with alcohol, but I’m on a mental health journey and I find kinship with the group of struggling misfits that stumble into those meetings every day.

I went because I knew I should, not because I wanted to. And I sat through every meeting with the defiance of a teenager doing parent-assigned chores on a Saturday night.

Every day the group leader would ask us to share how we were feeling and what our goal was for the next week, day, or even the next hour.

Every day my response was the same, “I’m good and my goal is to stay positive”. I said it quickly and flatly, yearning for the moment the attention could be off me again.

But then something strange started to happen. People from group started to say that my commitment to staying positive was inspiring them.

This caught me off guard. My desire to inspire has always been so strong in me, it's like my need to breathe. But in these meetings, I specifically put zero effort into inspiring. I specifically tried to be the most boring version of myself imaginable, because the past few years of trying and failing to inspire finally took their toll. I felt like a man jaded in love who gave up on romance for a life of one-night stands.

I don’t know if it was me, 30 days of repetition, or the fact that these people were desperate for anything resembling hope… but I was inspiring them.

I was inspiring them with 2 little words…. “Stay. Positive.”

As a writer, I like to think of words as the one thing I’m good at. I like to think of words as the little magical things I string together in complicated ways to make people feel something.

But in this dimly lit Church recreation room, it was the simplicity that struck people. And as the days went on, and I became more and more aware of my own negative internal monologue, the simplicity of those two words started to strike me as well.

Stay. Positive.

Yesterday at lunch with my brother, I said there was no point in trying to follow my dreams because I’d tried a million times and it simply wouldn’t work. He pointed out, the way he always has this past year, how negative my internal monologue is.

It doesn’t feel negative to me. It feels like truth.

I had become so negative that negativity started to feel like truth. (Maybe you can relate).

So yesterday…

I made a COMMITMENT to myself to stay positive and to restart my blog with all the vigor, positivity, and optimism that I once had.

I made a COMMITMENT to keep trying every single day to live a life that inspires people around me to follow their dreams and create a life they feel EXCITED to live.

I made a COMMITMENT to pull my long abandoned dreams out of the grave, dust them off, and run them through the washer until they look brand-spanking-new.

Stay. Positive. It has a nice ring to it…

It's a mantra.

It's a lifestyle.

It's a decision.

It's not easy, but to live by it can be life-changing.

Thank you for going on this life journey with me. Thank you for reading this post. Thank you for waking up this morning.

You are a miracle and I will do everything in my power to help you remember that every morning with this newsletter.

Bless your life. Bless your dreams. Bless the new beginning you have every single morning when you open your eyes.

And as always…

Stay positive,

Nicole