The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

It is what I say to my students as we come to the end of a timed writing, “Wind down and come to closure.” It is what I am doing now. This is the penultimate blog post of the 365 days. It is the day when everything that might have been written or said has been written and said, when I wind down, lay my pen down, and close the book on the year. Tomorrow I will come to you and tell you what I have learned on this journey.

I have written about the magic of the process of doing something for 365 days and there has been so much magic here, I said that yesterday. What I ask myself today. having gone back and read the first blog post that launched this whole experiment, was how, sadly, I could have imagined at the outset that I could have maintained what I had hoped to for 365 days. I said things like “I will not use the words ‘Mental Illness…'” and that I would only write positive happy things in an attempt to create a happy life by just, perhaps, say, on a bad day show a picture of a horse and say that I loved horses, to always keep it positive. Oh the naivete. One doesn’t want to be a “Debby Downer” but by the same token one has to be realistic. My heartfelt attempt to create an atmosphere in which happiness could grow wasn’t realistic. I had my moments, but then real life crept in, and for most of the last year you have indeed watched a woman who has had lifelong struggles with mental illness struggling, coping, and carrying on. And there were surely happy, joyful days and times, but it was life, it was everything, it held it all.

And because, in my heart of hearts, what I have always wanted to do with my blog was to help others who were suffering and struggling like I was to let them know that they were indeed not alone, that we could suffer and struggle but that in sharing, honestly, our burdens might somehow be lightened, a little, by knowing that we were a tribe of people who were and are surviving in the world today, well, this is what I have done this past year, as I have always done on this blog and with my writing, and what I will continue to do. We have been heartbroken over the number of suicides in the last year, and while many of these were well known people who got attention because of who they were there were countless others who died by suicide and that is almost too much to bear. What can one do to help?

Well, trying to paint a rosy picture about being happy happy happy all the time is not it, nor is dwelling on all of the negativity. How we survive, all manner of things, from little daily disappointments and heartbreaks to monumental life things, and how, in the face of all of this we can find a way to thrive, most days, I think that is my work, I think that has always been my work, and I no longer have any desire, much as it might make some people happy to see me do it, to try to blog on about all good things. It isn’t realistic, it isn’t what life is for most of us. Every single day seems to hold everything and I want to capture it all. My, I feel so tenderly toward the me that wrote that first blog post 364 days ago. She had just finally gotten balanced on medication and was feeling good for the first time in a very long time. She had no idea in the months to come she would be able to go back off medication and that a year hence she would have just come through a devastating hurricane where people died, and lost their homes, and where she feared for her own survival, and then had to deal with the aftermath in a town devastated by nature’s forces. Now the prudent use of Xanax is the only way I can cope. I am coming to the end of this Happiness Experiment just happy to be alive and continuing on. There is a lesson in all of this. There is so much more to say. I will say the rest tomorrow.

I am in part sharing my experience of how I started with one idea and ended up in a very different place for the benefit of those who will be joining me with their own 365 day project on Friday. Do what feels right for you but perhaps give yourself a little more leeway than I did. Realize that life being life will come in and have it’s way with you and that you never know on any given day what you may encounter but that you will show up and do your best through it all. That’s what I am going to try to do over the next year. For now I am closing the book on this project and allowing myself some space and time for final thoughts to arise that I can share with you tomorrow. I regret nothing, but I am wiser about what this process of 365 days means. I will learn more in the year ahead.