We lay in bed at night and talk. We ask each other questions. I ask M what he wants and he simply says that he wants for me to be happy. Happy! Happiness seems too elusive an emotion for me. I rarely feel happy these days. How can I feel happy when I am so dissatisfied with my life, with myself, with my realtionships, with my living location? I ask M to want something else, to ask me something different. He seems frustrated with my inability to just be happy. He says that I am complicated.
We bicker, we argue. I blame him for my boring life. He says he is doing the best he can, but ultimately, I am responsible for making my own happiness. If I am unhappy with my life I need to change it, do things that are more meaningful, more interesting, more stimulating. I complain, I turn my back on him and shut him out, I am angry with him, but a secret little part of me knows that he is correct.
How did this come to be? There was a time when my life seemed so full, of activities, of friends, of ideas, of potential. Maybe this is mid-life crisis, but I have recently realized that life is whizzing by me and I need to gain control of my life again. On the quick slide to 50, there is no more putting off my life, it's now or never. So....my New Year's resolution to be intentional about my life. I must admit that so far I have more intentional about my life, more activities, more positive, more organized, more creative, and I think I am feeling better. I have been watching my eating habits, and trying to only eat when I'm hungry and not out of boredom or eating my unhappiness.
Yesterday I stepped on the scales and I am down about 25 lbs, a drop in the bucket, but I have not seen this weight since shortly after my car accident almost ten years ago. Ten years! All of a sudden I became very emotional and realized that it had been almost ten years since I had really been happy. I was in that horrible accident and I think that I never realized it crushed my spirit as well as my body. My body, for the most part, healed in a year....but my spirit...it has been hurting a long time. It was an epiphany moment....I have lost ten years....but now the fog has lifted. For the first time in what seems like an eternity, I felt hopeful about my life, not weighed down by sorrow....I felt....happy!
The lost ten years....I never can recapture them. What's past is past, but if I dwell on them, then I stay in the darkness. There was much sadness, loss, and disappointment in that time. I let my family down. I let my friends down. Mostly I let myself down. But even in the despair, there were bright moments. Those are the memories I choose to focus on, those are the times I choose to remember.
The darkness lives with me always, it's my constant companion. But we all have baggage we carry with us in life. It will never go away, but now I will travel through life with me leading the way and making the decisions, not the darkness.
And yesterday? Well, yesterday I looked at my life and what I felt was happy. Happy! No specific reason. No mountain-top experience. Just a normal day in a normal life that I was happy with. No one other person had to make it happen, it just came from within me.
I texted M and told him that I felt happy. He replied that if I was happy then he was happy. It was a good day!
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