Learning how to be happy

“Josie Saw The World In Patterns”

Today I have officially begun the 2nd half of this 365 Day Experiment. It is exciting for all the reasons I wrote about yesterday. There have been so many changes in my life during the first half of the experiment I can’t begin to imagine where I’ll be six months from now. Every day I learn something new, I am open to receiving all of the gifts to come, I will use them well.

Today I have been drawing and painting all day, feeling, as I wrote to a dear one who commented after the last post, kind of dizzy-blissy. As I answered this reader what I had been trying to put my finger on all day came to me clearly finally and that is that while I have been searching for happiness being happy has never been a comfortable thing for me. That sounds odd, I know. Let me explain.

I realized that for me what comes along with happiness seems to be a sense of impending doom. As a child living a very mixed childhood of long term abuse, along with also having lovely times, good times, times of happiness to be sure, when the good times came I would forget, for a moment, the ugly, scary times that may have happened just a night or two before. There was that sense of “everything is going to be okay now” all too quickly followed by evidence that no, everything was not going to be okay now. It was not safe to believe that everything would be okay and let my guard down because when the bad thing happened again shortly thereafter it was all the more damaging because I had believed, for that brief shining moment, that now perhaps everything would be okay. As this went on until I was 18 the ruts in the road of my subconscious were deep. It seemed that I would not be able to steer out of them for long during any period.

I’m not going to recount all the ups and downs of my life, and I surely have had very happy times as an adult, most especially during the years of having and raising my 3 children, but even during those years though I loved being a mother, and loved my children deeply and dearly, as I do still, those old patterns were always present, just below the surface. It is hard for me to trust that happiness found will last, that I can be happy without nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Throughout my life this has meant, too, that playing in any form never felt safe to me, it was accompanied by a loss of control. Even things like board games made me nervous. I don’t like any kind of occasion where uncertainty is supposed to be part of the fun. If it was true that if nothing was ventured nothing would be gained I was perfectly happy not to aim at gaining. It was just too risky. This is all such a strange thing to think about, something that was not even on my radar when I started this experiment, that now, half way through, as I’ve begun to be happy I haven’t, I realize, really know what to do with it.

I think that’s why I had a few hard weeks after having several weeks of pure joy feeling so good physically, being able to be off medications, and all the rest. Now I was happy, now what? What was going to happen? Something bad for sure. It couldn’t last, it wouldn’t last, oh my God what was going to happen? And all of a sudden I started to become anxious and depressed. Not really bad, not like this time last year when the depression was so profound I couldn’t function, but there it was. And, I am quite startled to say this, to even think it, but I wonder if it took me so long to pull myself up out of it because being anxious and depressed was a familiar state, it was something I knew, and once I was there, well, the thing had happened, the happiness I had been experiencing had given way to darker more difficult days as somewhere in me I was always afraid it would, it hadn’t lasted, which is what I’d feared. But, the thing is, the depression didn’t last either, I was able to surface again, and happiness, or a sense of peace and well being, began to enter my life once more like sun streaming in through the window. Now my work is to trust it, to allow myself to feel it, to embrace it, and not worry that it is somehow undeserved or will all too soon be interrupted by something dark and scary.

Imagine, at almost 64, having to learn to be happy. It seems to me that happiness should be our natural state. Of course hard things happen but we should, I think, see the hard times as the unnatural times that we can recover from. When the hard times come we learn to endure, we make it through, we stumble and fall and then find our way back to grace. At least this is what I want to believe. I will stumble again, surely, many times, but each time I will rise again. I want my life to be centered on the rising, on the grace notes, on the joyful moments. This is what I need to work on in the 2nd half of this experiment.

Today, as I said, I was drawing and painting my way through the hours. It was lovely. But there was a sense of uneasiness. Not something I could put my finger on, but it was there. Now it is evening. I have made it through the day. I am tired but I am staying awake to all of this because I want to learn about it, I want to watch as these patterns rise again. I need to be fully aware of what is happening and I have to consciously breathe my way into the clearing. It was a good day. I made art. Actually, yes, I played. This is new for me, but I made art, and nothing bad happened, and yes, I still have to make it through the rest of the day, and this time of day, as night falls, can be a bit uncomfortable, but I am okay. I have made it through, I have allowed myself to feel happiness and nothing bad happened on the heels of this happiness. It’s an curious thing to look at on the conscious level, but here it is, and here I am, and all is well.

Day 183. I have found happiness, and now I am learning how to allow myself to allow it to be present in my life. Yes, this is new, and it is good.