About six months ago, I went through a major change in my life. Like most people, change doesn’t work so well with me. I eventually went into a minor, “week-day depression”, which eventually came to be clinical depression. In my depressed state, I had no self-confidence. I thought so negatively of myself all the time and my self-talk was a complete mess. Not one positive thought went through my head. Quite a while later,  still in my miserable state, I had a light bulb moment. I thought to myself, what if I could make something that I can turn to that will force me to think positive thoughts. That night, I felt excited for the first time in a long while, and I eventually came up with the idea of making a notebook for myself with positive, influential, even somewhat forceful thoughts.

The notebook I compiled for myself is called SCAN. It doesn’t stand for anything fancy – I even tried to think of a clever acronym but gave up after a while. The name SCAN was chosen for my notebook because I wanted to make it personal and still have something to do with getting rid of sad and negative thoughts. I immediately thought of something computer related since I like to toy computers so much. The thing that I thought of immediately is how anti-virus programs scan your computer for viruses, finds them, and then terminates them. This is sort of what my SCAN notebook does for me; when I think of negative thoughts, SCAN terminates the thought and makes me feel confident.

SCAN works pretty well for me. Whenever I’m feeling sad, hopeless, heart-broken, or anything else along those lines, I just flip through the pages of this notebook and it makes me happy. I actually tabbed and organized sections of the notebooks based on what to view when I’m feeling a certain way. For example, if I’m feeling alone and left out, I usually go to the section of SCAN with things that generally cheer me up and things that my friends had said about me.

My SCAN notebook is simply a 10 cent blue 70-page college-ruled spiral-bound notebook with the word SCAN written on the front in permanent marker with a bunch of hearts around it. It’s contents are completely unique to me and probably would have no meaning to anyone other than myself. The contents of the notebook might even be confusing yet hilarious to someone else. I even wrote a letter on the back of the from cover clearly stating that “whoever you are, you won’t get this at all because it’s personal”. All of the contents in the notebook are colorful, rainbow, happiness pages. This is only because it lifts my mood to see bright colors for some reason. There are many unique pages in my notebook. Here are a few examples:

• Compliments that people have given me and positive comments that people have said about me.
• Pictures of fun past events, gatherings, and holidays with friends.
• Song lyrics that make me feel warm and fuzzy.
• Quotes from my favorite musicians, actors, and other celebrities. These usually aren’t very motivational, but they still affect me positively since they’re funny.
• Motivational quotes and sayings.
• Excerpts and pictures from my favorite books, movies, and comics.
• Happy newspaper articles and comic strips.
• Pages stating and exaggerating (in a somewhat harsh tone) what a  wonderful, talented, and beautiful person I am. You’re allowed to be arrogant – no one should see it but you.
• Pictures of landscapes.
• A page containing some form of many combined “inside jokes” expressed through words, pictures, and anything that I found to correlate it with something funny.
• Movie tickets and fun pictures.

Basically, my SCAN notebook is a montage scrapbook of things that make me happy, even if it’s for a very short period of time. I would defiantly making something similar to SCAN for yourself, even if you think it’s useless. I look at SCAN a lot and it makes me feel good about myself.