You should read Learned Optimism, that book helped me tremendously. I guess I always knew I was a pessimist but the thing I did not realize is that there are different types of pessimism. The book has tests that score you on having a negative outlook and I scored moderately bad on that. The stuff I learned in this area is to strike negative words (Permanent and Pervasive) like "always" and "never" from your mental vocabulary. This was very eye-opening to me. The thing I scored much worse on was giving myself credit for my successes. In fact, I had my mid-year performance review today at work and my boss said, "12, you really need to pause every now and then and celebrate your success".......Go Figure!
Anyway, as far as your friend is concerned, you may be idealizing her a bit. The reason I say this is my W is like your friend and I have fallen in the trap of idealizing her and this has the same effect on me as it does on you. One thing I have learned is people with seemingly perfect lives can be really unhappy....Food for thought.
Hey Time, your post on math brought back memories for me. I started college in remedial math and ended up going all the way through differential equations as part of my science degree. I was like WTH, I can do math? Where the heck did that come from? LOL!
