Atharv Dua Blog Q1 Week 1 - Glass half full

I’m usually a glass half full type of person. I once started off a speech in Model UN with the hook “Are you lightning? Because I wanna make you McQueen”: I decided to call it highly successful because it got right about 50% of the audience (including, thankfully, the judges) which also made me crack up, which then proceeded to make me lose 10 seconds of speaking time in my speech.


Aside from my failure to represent Germany’s wishes, I think my “glass half full” mindset has been tested most of all with change. Believe it or not (I don’t) American is my 9th school, which is crazy considering it’s only been 10 years since the start of schooling for me! I’ve been all over the world, including multiple cities in the U.S., France, the UK, India and more! I’m sometimes asked whether my parents are diplomats: the fact that my dad’s a software engineer and my mom’s a teacher tends to shock most people. Having lived in so many places, the one disadvantage I think I have to live with is that I’m what my French teacher calls a “third-culture person”: it’s a term for a large group of immigrants who aren’t really fully immersed in their country of origin (India in my case) and the country that they currently live in (multiple in my case). I had to have broken some record considering I could technically be called a “ninth-culture child”. 


I’ve never really been too afraid of moving or change for that matter though: I love new experiences and meeting new people, so even though leaving friends and places behind is difficult, I’ve always had something to look forward to, and after a while you kind of just get used to it. 


I think that's how I learned to be as optimistic as I am, because moving and change in general gets hard without a positive outlook. My mom tells me that “hardship builds character”: I believe that all of us face some form of hardship in life, and everyone has their own way of adapting: mine's usually cracking a joke about it. 


Everyone has a celebrity crush: sure, mine might be an animated car in a 2006 movie, but Lightning MyQueen figured out that in our lives, the journey matters more than the destination (as cheesy as it sounds) and earning to use humor and positivity to cope with change has been a part of mine.





https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-the-glass-halffull-or-halfempty-science-knows-your-answer-a6676741.html

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