Earned Optimism: Hope, Identity and Being Authentically Yourself

What if optimism isn't something you're born with, but something you earn?Annabel Francis had done everything sensible till now; built a career, stayed married for thirty years, raised a daughter, paid the mortgage and fed the koi carp. She kept the wheels on.Then life decided to remove most of the wheels.Earned Optimism is a funny, candid and surprisingly practical exploration of what happens when the life you carefully constructed no longer fits the person you've become.Drawing on a spectacularly inconvenient collection of real-life experiences, including divorce, reinvention, identity, loss, career upheaval, a near-fatal accident and a missing tortoise, Annabel asks a more useful question than "How do I stay positive?"How do you build genuine optimism when you've got perfectly good reasons not to feel optimistic?Along the way, she explores the psychology behind hope, resilience, confidence and change, drawing on research from positive psychology, cognitive psychology and identity theory. But this isn't psychology delivered from a safe distance. The theories are tested against actual life: bad decisions, brave decisions, ridiculous moments, setbacks and the strange discovery that confidence often arrives after you act, not before.This is not a book about pretending everything is fine.It's about learning to separate circumstances from destiny. About discovering that acceptance doesn't have to mean surrender. About taking small actions that give you evidence that change is possible and gradually building a life that feels more like your own.If you've ever looked at your perfectly functional life and quietly wondered, Is this really it?, this book is for you.Part memoir, part popular psychology and part field guide to starting again, Earned Optimism is for anyone who's discovered that rock bottom may have terrible views, but it can also make a surprisingly good place to rebuild from.This is not simply a memoir about rebuilding a life after divorce or a humorous memoir on identity crisis; its an adult self acceptance journey through grief and resilience in adulthood, starting over after major life changes and being authentically yourself. You needn't simply hope for a life that feels more like your own. A more congruent life begins with recognising your identity and ability to evolve. Once you recognise your power to shape the future, earned optimism makes being authentically yourself essential.This candid memoir conclusively proves that identity can always be rewritten.