Fluent Essays

When you browse (different words?) Instagram or WeChat, you will see some people sharing happiness, while others sharing bad mood. Complaining in moderation is acceptable, but persistent negative emotions, often regretting things you've done, or feeling very unlucky, are all issues that need to be addressed. Especially for international students, as we come to a new environment, our mentality will directly affect our academic performance, communicative ability, and life status. So how do we adjust our mindset and not regret the bad decisions we've made when we don't have anyone else around to talk to? By changing a state of mind to think, we can immediately sweep away the negative emotions. It's a simple form of self-brainwashing, but it's useful for people of all ages, all races, all professions. In Buddhism, people live to atone for their SINS and to feel suffering. “life is suffering.” (In Buddhism, desire and ignorance lie at the root of suffering.) Maybe you don't believe in Buddhism, but everyone has bad times from time to time, in different forms and for different lengths of time. Psychological torture is much more painful than physical torture, so a bad mental state can indeed be called our "great challenge" in America. In this article, I will use my own experience and what I have heard from others to describe how to overcome the emotion of regret and turn negative emotions into positive motivations. (need to be revised) The first experience happened two years ago. My friend Erica took off her glasses and leaned her head on the steering wheel, sobbing uncontrollably. There was no signal (service?) in that area, leaving us like two abandoned dogs (other words to replace?) with nowhere to go. Seating in the passenger seats, I just couldn’t stop shivering and crying like a newborn baby. It was about 2 A.M., dark outside, and we were surrounded by bottomless trees and only one dim streetlamp. It's like being afloat for hours; The endless forests and Winding mountain roads made us feel suffocated. Erica kept muttering to herself something, but my ears were ringing, and I couldn't make out what she was saying. After about five minutes, we looked up and laughed at each other's swollen faces, horrible (other words to replace?) makeup, and red eyes. We arrived at our destination four o 'clock that day, but that was the first time I had ever seen a sunrise, and the negative feeling about how unlucky we are just disappeared. Instead, we focus on the morning breeze and pop music in the car. I used to think that I belonged to the unfortunate class of people in this world. With my lean limbs, dark skin, fuzzy eyes, Slow reflexes, and complete lack of curiosity, I was completely different from my peers in both appearance and personality. Luckily, my family does love me, but I can't live under their protection all my life. The difference in appearance slowly made me feel inferior. I began to distance myself from my companions and live in my own world. I thought that as long as I stayed out of it, people wouldn't intrude into my world and destroy it, until I heard a kindergarten classmate pointed his finger at me and screamed like finding something fun, "Autism! My mom said you're autistic!" and repeated for three times. The other kids sitting around him started laughing. What does that word mean? Why laughed at me like that? Why me? I am not supposed to be different with them, should I be excluded from the general public just because I am different from the rest of you in appearance, character, and behavior? When I told this with my mom, the first thing she said to me was, "You need to learn to fit in with other kids. Try to find your social circle and join them. Socializing is a skill you have to learn; it will definitely help you to survive in this society." It was the second sentence she said that stuck with me till now, 14 years later. "Don't hate yourself and regret the bad decisions you made," she says. “Unfair things happen all the time. BUT You're lucky. You have a sound body, enough food and clothes. Instead of feelings of regret and hatred, how about trying to find solutions to the problems?” “How?” I asked. “In your own way. If you haven't hurt anyone, but someone has treated you maliciously, just express your anger. There is no shame in expressing feelings.” But the reality is not ideal after all, especially in China, where an individual different from the majority can hardly blend in quickly. I once asked a friend if he had any recent regrets. He thought about it for a while and told me that several days ago, he forgot to take his Airpods with him when he went out. He couldn’t watch TikTok videos on the school bus, which is pretty bad for someone who is used to wear headphones and enjoy watching videos all the time. "But you know what?" He seemed to think of something interesting and smiled, " That was the first time I got a good look at the Ann Arbor campus, and I also made friends with a computer science major student who sat next to me.” It's a trivial thing and not very convincing example, but if he's constantly regretting that he didn't leave the house with his Airpods on and was constantly in a miserable state, will he be able to make friends, or enjoy the landscape? Obviously not. Therefore, trying to shift our attention from the unfortunate event to something positive can help us better adjust our attitude. "Regret" is the most negative emotion. The data (source from?) shows that more than 85 percent of people regret of something, and a large amount of people think their failure are due to their bad lucks. But how do you define whether something is lucky or not? In Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus：A Brief History of Tomorrow, he points out that We begin to feel unlucky and less satisfied because our own definition of happiness has become higher. If you are happy to have a hot bowl of porridge every day, if you are happy to have someone say hi to you on the road today, if you can reduce your requirements for luck and happiness, and put misfortune into other positive perspectives, life will suddenly be full of hope. "The secret of success is to have a good mentality." Therefore, from my own perspective, nothing/ nobody can be defined as totally lucky or unlucky, since things’ good or bad depending on how you look at them. If anyone can be passionate and hopeful under high stress, so can you. I like A comment posted on one YouTube video about the topic of “70 people age 5-75 answer: What’s your biggest regret? | Glamour”. The Comment responder Andrea wrote: “It seems that younger people regret things they've done, and older people regret things they haven't done.” Hence, the things that you are now regretting, they might be your previous experiences when you memorize them years later. Instead of complaining about “how unlucky I am” or “I really regret that I did…. which made me looks stupid and funny.” Why not thanks for these experiences for pushing you growing up? No idea how to write the CONCLUSION-