This week has been tough. My fellow LGBTQ+ peers and I have been spending it fighting for our rights against the establishment and against the other students at this school. And then, the election happened and, well, that did not end well. But I don't want to talk about that. I can't keep surrounding myself with this negativity all the time. It will make me burnt out and hating life. So instead, I will be talking about something that I started doing last week.

One of my closest friends and I have a motto for 2017. "Everything is going to be alright." He came up with it during a time when both of us were feeling very down and disheartened and not knowing where to go or what to do. He decided to adopt the motto early and start finding happiness and love in the little things around him every day. And that's when I realized that I needed to do a similar thing. Sometimes, it's so hard for me to find love and happiness, that I need to remind myself that it exists at all. Things like little compliments or kind comments are lost on me, and I find myself unable to take them to heart and appreciate them.

So, I did. I created a new blog and decided to start a project with it. Every day, I have been making posts including something that happened during the day that made me feel happy and something that happened that made me feel loved. These could be as mundane and simple as "My friend brought me sushi to eat for dinner today." Or as significant as "My mom sent me an email asking me if I was okay and to call her if I needed anything." Sometimes, the only happiness I can find is "I got to sleep in for an extra hour today." But others, I can come up with a list of things that people did to make me feel so loved.

I want to be able to look at this again months from now and remember all of the beautiful things that my friends and family have done for me. I hope that someday, I won't need to write a post every day so that I can love myself. But for now, that's what gets me through my days, and I'm okay with it.

So, readers, I want to challenge you to do this as well. You don't have to open up a blog and post the things that happened to you in great detail. I just hope that you can start thinking deeper about and appreciating the little things in life. No matter how awful a day may be, I want you to be able to find something that makes you feel happy and makes you feel loved. It's already started to make a huge difference in my life. I hope it will make one in yours as well.