The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

One month ago I was looking with excitement to the end of this experiment, to the knowledge that I would have blogged for 365 consecutive days without missing a day, and oh what a journey it had been. I was already planning the next year’s experiment, a year of drawing and painting Anna, my alter-ego, and writing an illustrated book, chronicling the journey of doing it all here over the next 365 day period, but, as is said, life is what happens when you are making other plans. Hurricane Florence swept in, the power went out for a week, the blogging journey came to an abrupt halt as the hurricane hit and, in the dark days after the hurricane I realized that I could not spend the next year creating a delightful, fun, artful experiment. Too much had happened. The hurricane ravaged this town, people died and lost their homes, most of us have scary messes to deal with that we will be dealing with for some time, all of a sudden the fun project with Anna was no longer relevant nor did I care about it. There were deeper issues at hand.

In the days after the hurricane I read by flashlight and lantern a book that moved me deeply. It was Julia Cameron’s memoir Floor Sample. It was positively riveting. People know her for her seminal work with “morning pages” in The Artist’s Way, but have no idea how and why that work originated. It came out of clinging to writing 3 pages a day as she was trying to get sober after a devastating 20 years of alcoholism and drug abuse and many breakdowns and bouts of mental illness. I could not put it down and read for hours as torrential rains hit the house after the devastation of the hurricane. What I saw was not the delightful author of The Artist’s Way but an incredible survivor. A woman who many times over could have died from acute alcoholism, terrifying breakdowns where she had completely lost touch with reality and had to be taken by police into custody to the safety of a mental hospital, and more. What I saw was a woman who survived, and is surviving, and continues to deal with mental health issues but carries on. What I knew, as I sat in the darkness scribbling in my own notebook was that what I needed to write about was survival. Surviving … hurricanes, mental illness, aging, and more. Just plain surviving. Each and every one of us surviving what we must and do each and every day.

In the aftermath of this hurricane with a tree on the house and trees down everywhere and trees through my fence and my big double gate going into the back yard that provided safety for my dogs broken and unusable and a whole host of other things that needed to be done was that I myself was broken too. I have written about this in the past days. Mental illness does not disappear. It abates or goes into remission with treatment and medication and constant self-care and vigilance but coming out of this hurricane all of my mental health issues were waving red flags and I was terrified. I don’t begin to know how long it will take before I am right again, or as right, as okay, as I will ever be able to be. There is no magic pill or treatment that will remove this suffering from me completely. I have to survive, moment by moment, day by day, as best I can. Many of us, perhaps most of us, are surviving our own set of circumstances, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial and more. Right now trying to survive every one of those things has left me on shaky ground.

And yes, as I wrote about yesterday there are little miracles, there are angels, there has been help, but there is still so much to do, to fix, to cope with, to survive. None of this will be an easy fix for us here.

In the last days, however, something has shifted in me, something that hasn’t wanted to spend a year writing about surviving. It has seemed too harsh, too, well, something that could create an atmosphere of always writing about the hard things in life, and surely, though things are very hard right now, they surely aren’t all hard. Yes, there were those angels yesterday, yes, there is love and joy and beauty in the world. The end of this week my son and his family will be here for a visit and I will hold my 2 1/2 year old grandbaby in my arms. I don’t want to spend the next 365 days writing about surviving, so, then, what do I write about? This has left me stumped and I’m running out of time to figure it out. This Thursday is Day 365 of this 365 day experiment and Friday I will begin the next one. It is how I have planned this, to carry right on into the next project, and I both want to do it, need to do it, and have other dear souls whom I invited to do their own 365 day project and work right along with me on their own blogs who have waited to start with me until I could get there since I had the delay with the hurricane and power outage.

I am not sure yet what Friday will bring on this blog. It feels like it wants to be gentler, and more open. I have learned that I meant well with naming this current 365 day experiment a search for happiness but much of the time that’s not what I wrote about at all, and it is surely not where I am ending. I am living in a post hurricane world as I write these last 4 blog posts and I am sad and scared and lost. Much of what I will be writing about will be about surviving because this is simply where I am, but how to be more inclusive of all of life? I jotted a note down yesterday… “365 Days Of Surviving and Thriving With Grace, Faith, and Determination.” That feels closer, but it’s a mouthful! I’m still thinking.

I have 4 days. Do you have any thoughts? When you read my blog what is it that you come for? What is it that I write about that helps you? Is there something you would like to see me write about? I am open to suggestions, I will consider what you have to say.

Today is yet another day of post hurricane recovery and I have a list of things to tend to here. I will keep thinking. And like everyone else in this storm damaged town I will carry on.