Happiness is Something You Learn

Our ego is created to protect us from pain. We seek out what keeps us comfortable and minimizes our pain. We seek sources for filling the bottomless pit of lack that we feel in certain areas. When we look outside ourselves to fill those voids, nothing is ever enough. We think getting that ONE thing will make us happy, and if we think we’ve found it, we will be happy for a while – until we get a wake-up call. Because it wasn’t ever real to begin with. We thought something worked as a replacement for the lack we felt inside of ourselves – only to later learn that it didn’t perfectly fit – because it was never supposed to.

You can’t be happy until you learn all of this. You can’t be happy until you know you are good enough and that you will survive and pull through no matter what comes your way. You can’t be happy until you accept yourself and love yourself.

That is not something you can pull extra hours at work to obtain. That is not something you can fix with drugs, sex, food or another person’s love.

That is something you learn.

You learn to be happy.

Through all of these lessons, you learn how to be happy. You learn the feeling of accepting yourself, no matter what. You learn to be okay despite whatever horrible things happen. You can’t strive for happiness – you can’t obtain it – you learn it.

All Your Eggs in One Basket

I spent a little time today thinking about my expectations for a romantic relationship. We seem to think there is one person out there who can “save” us and will make us infinitely happy. At a young age, a friend of mine once told me not to put all my eggs in one basket. My response has always been that it is easier to find one person to understand you and care for you than it is to find several people...

One of the books I’m reading suggests that you bring some aspects of “romance” to your friendships to lessen the pressure you put on your romantic relationships. Well, the same thing applies. I can’t talk to my “friends” the same way – I’ve tried. The people who have been around me do not understand me at all. If I ever try to go to them with my thoughts or problems, I always end up angry and frustrated because they have no idea what I’m talking about and I just have to give them a lecture about how my world works and how they need to realize my truths in their own lives, and for what? How is that helpful to anyone? When I’m in a relationship, the guy actually gets it. He may not understand completely, but I pick guys I can have an intelligent and meaningful conversation with about these things, and sometimes they even agree. At the very least they respect and admire me for my views and morals. So… bringing that to my friendships?

Well I guess the solution is clear: Make new friends. That’s been my goal for a while, but I guess I’ve been slacking. Last time I tried, I ended up with a boyfriend, haha. There are a couple people I know now that I can share knowledge with in these ways. Finding people like that isn’t exactly easy. Most people my age still act like they are in college. Actually, the people I’m referring to are a decade or more older than me… figures!

Those are not helpful thoughts. Those are negative thoughts. I choose love instead.

Things will change. What I want from a relationship will change. I worry so much about the other person’s motives, habits and thoughts – well guess what? I really am good at reading people. Not perfect, but unusually good. That is my gift. Therefore, I don’t have to have all this fear about ending up with someone horrible. I have really good intuition. I need to give myself some credit, and look to my old relationships to back me up. I know what’s going on. I figure people out. If I decide someone is worth my time, and if I decide to get married, it will most certainly be one of the most careful, planned, researched and validated decisions someone could make. There are no guarantees, because you never know how life will turn out – HOWEVER – if anyone is going to choose the right person, it would be me. I can trust myself.

Not to mention, all these changes I’m going through are going to help me. It’s going to be my responsibility to keep the relationship afloat. Let’s face it – as exes have told me, I have things figured out way better than most people do. I can’t expect someone to be at my level of understanding of the human mind. Frankly, if someone is at my level, I should trust them less, because they could be using it for evil. I feel like, if I get married, it will end up being with someone who is pure “enough”, who respects my opinions and looks up to my wise views and is patient and willing to work on any issues we have in the ways that I have spelled out. Everything else… I don’t know how that will turn out. I will have to use all this enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it, to determine how we work through things, and I will have the most responsibility placed upon me to make sure I do not react out of fear and stay on the path of love.

That makes it sound like I’ll have to be the parent… to my husband. While I know this is a common joke, that is not the reality I wanted for myself.

I don’t know. Whatever… my mind is just trying to find a comfortable place to rest on this topic. It has not worked yet. Regardless, life changes. I know that. I have to keep reminding myself of that. Just because relationships mean one thing to me now, and just because I want certain things now, does not mean that will be it forever. All I can do is just work on myself and wait and see. As always, I’m applying all these generalizations to all men everywhere, which isn’t fair. I’ll feel it when a candidate comes along, and I can apply my thoughts there. I just hate how feelings can meddle with my process. Like last time, I knew I was right, but something told me it was okay. And it was. He was a good guy and the circumstances started me on this journey, yet he himself was not right for me. We were meant to pass through each other’s lives at that time. I hate that answer, but sometimes it’s as simple as that.

Just worry about making yourself happy. Worry about being whole all by yourself. The rest will work itself out.

Don't Make Excuses

As we now know, the voice in our heads is not us. I always assumed it was until a few months ago when I read The Untethered Soul – I thought that was exactly me. Now I know that mostly the voice in my head is my ego trying to protect me from whatever pains it has experienced. One of the ego’s tricks is excuses. Sometimes I’ll know I need to do something, and then I’ll put it off until later because I have more important things I need to take care of. While sometimes that is completely legitimate, most of the time it is not. I can take the extra time to go handle something. I even convince myself I will be more efficient if I do things in a certain order. Again, not always the case. So lately I’ve been making sure that I follow through with little tasks.

I get home and take off my business jacket and hang it on a chair. I decide, when I go upstairs in a minute, I’ll take it with me.

Nope – do it right away. No middle-man action of hanging it on the chair. Take it directly upstairs and put it away. Now.

I get the mail and put it on the counter. After I make dinner, then I will sort through it.

Nope – do it now.

I can come up with excuses all day long, but I can’t allow myself to procrastinate. That’s how the clutter happens. Each small excuse creates a tiny piece of the mess that adds up at the end of the week when I have to clean the whole huge thing up. I don’t have to be perfect, but I do have to make a big effort to follow through with what I know I have to do. I’ve already noticed an improvement. It makes me feel better, too.

What excuses do you come up with? What middle-man can you cut out so you can have a better life?

Re-Invent Yourself and Your Life

More changes are happening. I’m able to let events happen and let words pass through me. I’m able to take what resonates and leave the rest. It’s not perfect, but I’m definitely noticing improvement. I recently had someone in my life ask if I’d taken care of something, and I didn’t have time to look into it really, and I thought I hadn’t. So I proceeded to get lectured. Normally I’d get all defensive and upset and feel like a failure and have all of these emotions. This time, I just accepted the comments and moved forward with what I could do. Turns out I’d misunderstood, and I had taken care of it, anyway… but the important part here is that I didn’t let the lecture bring me down. I even accepted validity in it and made a mental note to work on that aspect of myself.

It’s important to know that even when you screw up, you are not a failure. Beating yourself up, attacking back, defending yourself – all of these things are wasted energy. Well, actually I’m only taking into account things that are not moral-based. So let’s ignore moral-based screw-ups for now. Your typical daily screw-ups do not make you a failure. Even semi-big screw ups do not make you a failure. Really, even the huge things are still just part of being human, but that takes a whole other level of acceptance and love that I am not quite at yet, so I’m starting small. Baby steps. All you can do is move forward – learn from your mistakes, face your fears, get to the root of the problem and push on. Don’t dwell. Don’t hate yourself. Work to improve your situation. Work to improve your habits, your thoughts and your life. “Every day is a chance to re-invent yourself.” That’s a quote from an old tv show that was on for a little while called Men In Trees from back in… 2007 or so. So many good quotes from that show, it’s really too bad it went away.

Who are you going to be today? How are you going to re-invent yourself? How are you going to re-invent your life?

What Others Think

I keep having a huge issue with what other people think of me, but in a very specific way. If you don’t like something about me, and what you don’t like is true about me, then I couldn’t care less. But if you’ve taken something you noticed and developed a story behind it that is not true, and you dislike me, judge me or even pity me because of it, that ticks me off.

If you don’t like me because you think I am on a high horse, that’s fine. I can see how you’d think that. I accept your disapproval.

If you don’t like me because I can be a little socially awkward at times, that’s fine. It’s true sometimes. I accept your disapproval.

If you don’t like me because I can be judgmental and I jump to the worst conclusions, that’s fine. It’s true. I accept your disapproval.

But if you think that I become lost in whatever relationship I am in, then that is incorrect. When I look at it from someone’s perspective, maybe I can see why they’d get that idea, but that is incorrect. They don’t have all the information. That bugs me. They are wrong. I am way stronger and self-sufficient than they are giving me credit for.

If you think my getting upset is fake and melodramatic and is simply to get attention, then you are mistaken. That really bugs me. That’s completely wrong.

Etc.

How do celebrities do it? No wonder they have meltdowns. People draw all sorts of conclusions about them, judge them, and believe it as fact, when they really have no idea what is going on. Celebrities deal with this crap every single day. They are forced to learn the lesson that you can’t care what other people think. That lesson is presented to them at every turn. “Haters gonna hate” (pretend there is some swag in that statement, haha). For the purposes of this lesson, maybe I should pretend I am a celebrity. This reminds me of that movie “The Holiday” – be the leading lady in your own life! If I walk around owning my stage as if I were a hotshot celebrity, would that help me conquer my discomfort with other’s false opinions of me?

Shouldn’t I correct them? If someone thinks something false about me, shouldn’t I clear that up? Can’t that come back to haunt me if I get a reputation that isn’t true? This is WHY I lived my life the way I did – to AVOID such things, and yet they happen anyway. I guess the point is that you should just show them. Over time, they will figure it out. Don’t worry about their opinions. You don’t have to defend yourself.

…Sure I can say that, but I don’t believe it and I am not to the point where I want to do that. I want to correct them. I want to defend my honor and my reputation. I want to avoid bad things happening down the line because someone made an assumption about me.

I’m trying really hard to not get so worked up about it, but once a false opinion about me is presented, my body tenses up, my mind clutches it, and my defenses go to work. I can’t help it.

Well, I know that I CAN, eventually, but right now, I don’t know how to control it.

Yet another thing to work on and figure out what the best balance is.