[Wreck]

While I worked very hard, I played even harder. I ended up throwing around too much money, running up too much consumer debt, and drinking way too much too often. I started getting more and more depressed, as things seemly fell apart around me. It was at this point I was involved in a pretty serious accident, which nearly took my life - thus my user name (and another story). Although this marked the beginning of my turning point, things still got worse before they got better.

I went from being a "happy-go-lucky-life-of-the-party" drunk to a "mean-and-bitter" one. My job was a government contract and so was "soft money," meaning at any time they could pull the plug or we could not get the funding renewed. The funding started falling off and we started laying off people. The stress of living like a rock star added to the stress of an unstable job and it got to be too much.

So I started longing for a simpler job, one where work wasn't so fast paced, and where there was a little more security. A few months later, just that job fell into my lap. This was about five years ago.

Now, up until this point, I had no idea of the Law of Attraction. I had no idea what was going on. I do remember becoming a whiny little b**** about what was going on around me. All I saw was my failures, and I remember asking myself many, many times, "What the heck is wrong with me?" Yet, at the same time, I noticed that I was fairly successful in my career - at the time it was the only success.

It was during this time that I picked up this roommate who's Mr. Positive Thinker. He saw me depressed way to often, and always dysthymic, and starts telling me about positive thinking. It gets me to start paying attention to what's going on, and I start realizing that I'm always thinking about the negative, always noticing what's going wrong around me. It was also around this time that I decided I was going to make a concerted effort to better myself, so I started cleaning up my diet a bit and working out - nothing drastic, but I felt I had to do something.

It was about this time two years ago when things kind of clicked with me. I figured out that with me always asking myself "What the heck is wrong with me?", that my subconscious was going to work on finding answers to the question. I started noticing a more positive attitude within myself in general as I started noticing the results of taking care of myself. I started forcing myself to stop thinking negatively. I remember it was two years ago because there was another friend of mine who used to talk to me about this stuff - about believing in yourself, about striving for goals that were positive. I remember because he was killed just before Christmas, and I had been thinking about him a lot, and how I was starting to understand the things he was telling me.

I'd also tried to quit smoking several times, unsuccessfully, until I finally got fed up enough to have it stick. How I finally quit was instead of focusing on "not smoking," on "quitting smoking," on how I "couldn't smoke," I started focusing on the reasons I wanted to quit. I thought about this better version of me that I was wanting to become.

Last summer made one year of not smoking, and I started realizing that through focusing on what I wanted, I got it. By focusing on not smoking, I was getting smoking, but by focusing on becoming a healthier and more in control me, I was becoming a healthier and more in control me. Mr. Positive Thinking had turned me on to Wayne Dyer, and this absolutely wonderful quote of his, "The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind." That really, really hit home with me so I started off by Googling that quote. From there I found Steve Pavlina's site and read a few of his articles, and read about the Law of Attraction. Bam, there it was.

Looking back now, I can see that the state of my life, was in fact, reflecting the state of my mind. That everything that I thought about I got - good and bad. That the success in my career was due to me naturally and instinctively following the Law of Attraction. I'd tried for years to get out of debt, yet a few years ago when I started reading books on wealth, suddenly my debt started shrinking. Instead of focusing on my debt, I was focusing on creating my wealth - the Law of Attraction is working. Instead of wondering what's wrong with me, I wondered what I could do to make myself better - the Law of Attraction is working.

For me, there's no question that the Law of Attraction works.