I hated Mondays. And I hated Sunday “Funday”. Sunday’s depressed me because I knew in a matter of hours I’d be fair game for anyone who wanted to insert their will into my life and I was barely hanging on emotionally.
People have different ways of coping. Some may drink alcohol, do drugs, take “happy” pills, gamble, over work themselves, fill their life with distractions or any number of things. For me, I was sleeping a lot and becoming anti social. Sleeping too much is a warning sign for me. I was depressed and sleeping was how I kept myself from recognizing and addressing the issue.
Life isn’t about coping. Coping is just numbing and keeping your head in the sand. How you feel matters. When you’re going through life numb or with blinders on you’re disregarding how you feel you’re disregarding reality. For me, I was living a life that didn’t feel good anymore. I was in a dead end relationship and my business was suffering after focusing on him for so long. I had lost myself. I was exhausted, stuck and I felt like a fraud. I had to save myself and that meant finding my happiness. I needed time to find myself and create a new life.
“Happy” is one of the first words we learn and yet it’s so disregarded as adults. As we age we trade “Happy” for all sorts of things – most of which don’t take into account what we need to be truly fulfilled.
How do you start finding your happiness? You reassess your relationships, habits, beliefs, everything. It started with a process of elimination. Out with the old that doesn’t make you happy and anything that drains you has to exit or be redefined. I knew I had to leave my home and a relationship I didn’t trust anymore. I had to hit the reset button in a big way.
Eventually I started taking an interest in my own life and my life felt small, especially while reeling from a breakup. I looked for clues in my daily life. What did I gravitate towards? Once your cup is empty you’re much more careful about what you allow in it. If you can’t think of anything that makes you happy at first don’t be hard on yourself. The only thing I could think of in the beginning was my morning tea ritual. It was a small comfort and continues to be to this day. It really can be the little things that reveal your path.
I’m not preaching something that’s easy to do. It takes courage to change your life for an unknown outcome but it’s more than worth it to become someone you respect and admire. Courage is a decision – a commitment to have faith and move forward.
The primary reason this process was frightening for me is I knew I’d lose people in my life. You tend to lose people when you switch to an authentic life. It’s like holding up a mirror to others and rather than be forced to look inside themselves and find their own self deceit they prefer to fall away from you. Waking up can be scary shit and our fear based society doesn’t exactly encourage it.
So how do you know you’re on the path to happiness and doing something authentic? When you make decisions and proceed through life from the heart rather than for attention. That’s when you start to experience something called Joy. <3