The Experiment: Day 308 ~ Use The Teaspoon, or, What I’ve Learned in 308 Days…

“When I am in my darkest place, simply getting out of bed is tantamount to moving a mountain with a teaspoon. Getting started is the hardest part. It gets easier after that. I promise.”
Susan M. Brackney
The Lost Soul Companion
“A Book of Comfort and Constructive Advice for Black Sheep, 
Square Pegs, Struggling Artists, and Other Free Spirits”

I have spent a lot of the last 308 days with a teaspoon in my hand.

Almost one year ago I signed on for what I thought would be a fun project. My blog was 10 years old in September 2017 and while I had at one time blogged daily I hadn’t been blogging regularly for some time. The fabulous Effy Wild had issued a challenge. She said she was going to blog every day in September, and asked who’d like to join her? I thought heck I could do it for a month, surely. And so it began.

The thing is I was just beginning to see the light of day after months of depression so profound, the anxiety disorder I had lived with since childhood off the charts, that one night my daughter had to call the Mobile Crisis Unit. Things were really bad, bleaker than I can express here. I had come to the place where I wasn’t suicidal but I was in very bad shape and I didn’t know how I could go on. I changed doctors, and meds, and was put on a very high dose of antidepressants. I started to see some light through the cracks. September arrived and I started Effy’s challenge.

I tried, I really did try, and I was doing it most days, but I was missing some. And then it occurred to me that if I didn’t find my way to happiness, some way, some how, well, I couldn’t imagine what would happen to me. I was 63 which I didn’t consider old but a little too old to still be living in the depression and despair I’d lived in my whole life. If I was going to change things I’d better damn well get started. On September 22, 2017 I started this experiment, “A 365 Day Search For Truth, Beauty & Happiness.” I wasn’t sure how I could begin, what I would do, or what I would find but I committed to one year (Not having been even able to make it through the month with Effy!) and I began. And sister, I’m tellin’ ya, it was teaspoon by teaspoon in the beginning and more often than I’d like to admit up to today.

In a way it has never gotten easier, but in yet a different, remarkable way it has been an incredible journey. On October 11, 2017 I started the ketogenic diet and in 2 months, less than 6 months after the Mobile Crisis Unit had to be called, I was off all psych meds. I have written about that elsewhere. It is one of the miracles of the ketogenic diet. I am also no longer in the diabetic range, my blood pressure is good, and as of today I am within a pound of being down 50 pounds. My physical and emotional health has changed dramatically for the better and continues to do so, but let me be clear about something…

Doing so well you can come off meds, which I did under very close supervision and I am still under supervision, is an incredible thing. It does not, however, mean everything just goes along hunky-dorey and you are no longer anxious or depressed. What it means is that you are now able to manage these things without medication. I am still in weekly therapy and work very hard at wellness and self care is at the top of my list. But I have learned that for some of us skipping through life in a happy-go-lucky fashion is just not going to happen. And that’s okay.

What I’m finding, 308 days in with 57 left to go, is that “happiness” is relative, that no matter what we do we are still going to have to live our way through life, that there will be difficult days and challenging times, there will be mountains to climb, but that we always have that teaspoon and if that’s the way we have to move the mountain, so be it.

And then the day comes — because crikey, we have shown up for 308 days come what may — that we realize that moving the mountain a teaspoonful at a time is okay, it may just be our way. And in that moment — which came for me just today, just NOW as I am writing this — WE ARE FREE! Because true happiness, real happiness, the happiness I was seeking at the outset even though I had no way to understand it then, isn’t about finally finding the way to have gloriously blissful days all the days of our life. No, it’s about coming to the place where we realize we can get through life no matter what it takes. We can love and be loved. We can fall down and get back up. If we wake up almost every morning jittery with anxiety but we can still get up, get the dogs out, feed them, make our coffee and get started on the day, indeed make it through the day, and do our work, and we can mostly be okay, heck, that’s more than I ever thought I’d find the night the Mobile Crisis Unit showed up here.

And there are indeed times of great happiness. Not whole days, seldom anyway, but nice chunks of a good many days. And here are my sweet pugs, always just inches away from me, my darling children and grandchildren, dear friends, students. and more. So much more. And what I realized today is that some people seem to steamroll through life driving big earthmovers and they GET THINGS DONE. Others of us follow miles behind, far more slowly, teaspoon in hand, but you know what, finally, it is okay by me. And there are gifts here too.

People who can move through life at a great clip, have lots of money, travel the world, fly around the globe, and live life at breakneck speed miss a lot. I think about what it was like to be a mother of very young children. We lived in the country then and you don’t take little children on a walk and get anywhere very fast. They stop every few feet (or inches) to look at a ladybug, a wildflower, a pretty rock, a tadpole in the stream. They see everything. We teaspooners are much the same way. Traveling through a single day might seem to take years, but each hour along the way may be lived so slowly that we find hidden gems that others would have rushed past. While we are moving the mountain with our teaspoon we may find diamonds there. In the last 308 days I have found diamonds.

I have made many new friends, gained new followers to this blog, renewed and deepened a friendship with someone I’ve known for nearly 40 years and started writing stories with her — the first fiction I have written in decades and I love it — and begun teaching again which is just completely rocking my world. I have gone out a little more, had a few adventures that I couldn’t have imagined having or managed a year ago, and most important of all I can see, and believe, even though I don’t quite know how it will all work out, that there is a life for me afterall. There are so many more possibilities for me than I ever dreamed there could be. And look at me! I couldn’t make it through last September with dear Effy but I’ve made it 308 days out of 365 and counting, I haven’t missed a day, and I will be here until the end. I don’t know what will happen after that but I know I will keep on blogging, it has become a spiritual practice for me. Some people meditate, I blog, it is the practice that gives me purpose and meaning and moves me forward.

I love this. Yes, I’ve learned a few things these last 308 days but nothing more important than this, it’s what I will leave you with today — use your teaspoon, and be grateful for it. Relish the journey, teaspoonful by teaspoonful, and savor the diamonds, they are surely there.

The Experiment ~A 365 Day Search For Truth, Beauty &
Happiness: Day 1 ~ Introduction To The Project
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
Yoda

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