How Full is My Bucket??

Anyone who knows me, and has known me for a while, knows that I am not exactly notorious for my cup-half-full-susie-sunshine-sort-of-outlook on life. (That is not to say that I can't be a barrel-o-laughs though) And just recently I have been trying to figure out why. Is this a nature or nurture outcome? Some of the other nurses have brought my less-than-I-can-do-anything-and-do-it-great approach to light. I am scheduled to take boards on the 19th of this month, and naturally everyone keeps asking me about it. But really folks, I am terrified. And I am not an anxious test-taker. But it's a big test - it's hard and it makes a lot of people cry. So, I won't give all the details of how it came about but I was basically guinea-pigged into reading this book called "How Full is My Bucket?" I haven't read it yet, but they are all dying to know if I have and if it has changed me into a positive thinker. But a part of me thinks that I am kind of wired this way. But then again, I am a fairly easy-going, chipper person and I love to laugh, so why do I always sell myself short? I believe a big part of it, at least in the past few years, was my experience in the Army - 3 years of never being good enough and humiliation can wear on a person. Will it ever be something I can truly overcome? Or will I always have that pang of possible failure lurking, filling my bucket with emptiness? I know no one likes to fail at anything, and I am a true believer that the biggest growth can sometimes come from a big failure, but somehow I need to find the strength to truly believe that I can do it, it being anything. And that I truly am good enough. I can't say that I have not at some point had thoughts like "I am single because I am not pretty enough" or "I am single because I am not skinny enough" and to say that seems absolutely ridiculous and trite. How incredibly selfish of me to identify myself as "the only one who didn't....." or "the only one who doesn't have...." It is actually quite ludicrous. But I really think that the heart of it is me being enough for me. I don't know that I ever had it, or maybe I have just lost it. But somewhere, somehow, I have got to be enough for myself. I have to fill my bucket. I can't fill it with money. I can't fill it with a man. I can't fill it with friends. I can't fill it with cats. I can't fill it with degrees. I can only fill it with myself.

Whoa. That's kind of heavy and not at all easy-going and chipper. Nobody ever said growing up was easy. (If they did they are dumb. :-D )