Happiness

Let me preface this by saying that I have no answers. I have musings, conclusions, thoughts, ponderings, diatribes and personal epiphanies, but I have no answers. I've been thinking about happiness a lot lately. I've been observing and questioning and finally came to the following conclusion: I am responsible for my own happiness. Not only is it my responsibility, it's my duty. Not only is it a duty to myself, it's a duty to my parents and to my child. I owe it to myself and to the people who love me to make sure I fulfill my obligation to happiness. 45 years ago, I was brought into this world with the expectation that I would grow to be a happy, content, self-sufficient adult. When I was in the womb, I was fed, nurtured, talked to, and cared for with the anticipation that I would be happy. What mother doesn't rub her tummy and dream of her child growing up strong, healthy and happy? My destiny was to be happy. As a parent, I owe it to my child to be happy. He's 21 now and I'm finding that all of those years when I thought he was a ball of hormonal angst in high tops, he was paying attention. He wasn't so self-absorbed that he didn't see my moods, notice how I dealt with situations and reacted to adversity. We were out with the whole family for my birthday last week and he pulled me aside to talk to me. He told me how much he admired me, how proud he is of me for surviving the life I've led and how grateful he is that I'm his mother. Oh my God, he was paying attention! Even when he hated me he was paying attention. He's still paying attention and I owe it to him to show him how to be a happy adult. I taught him how to shop for groceries, how to balance a checkbook, how to talk to adults, how to chew with his mouth closed. Did I teach him to be happy? I hope so. Abraham Lincoln said, "Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." I believe this is true. The more I research the art of happiness and study people who are happy and those who aren't, I'm finding that it's a personal decision. You are responsible for your own happiness. No other person or external condition can make you happy or unhappy. You control your own happiness by your own thoughts and actions. Your happiness is in the palm of your hand. Choose to be happy. Learn to be happy. Most of us fought for weight loss surgery and took our lives and our destinies in our hands. We took back control. We fought like hell with our insurance companies, mortgaged our homes, argued with medical personnel and even left the country. Our lives were worth fighting for. The same is true of our mental well-being. If our lives aren't filling us with joy, we need to figure out why and take action. If it's chemical, get a pill; if it's emotional, get a therapist; if it's a matter of you just don't know how to be happy, start learning. Somewhere there is an answer that will lead to happiness; it's just a matter of finding the path and setting forth. Big, Happy Hugs, Connie

Thank you for this. Wow. You are so, so right on about ever word in this post. I remember trying to keep a diary at almost 400 lbs., hoping my writings would provide me some inside into why I was killing myself with food. I remember writing the same thought over and over again, in different ways... In fact, I just found it, dated May 25, 1999 -- I wrote: The heaviest burden to a sensitive child is the unhappiness of her parent... A parent's unhappiness is a burden to the child... Jillian carries my pain, like Atlas, with no place to go... A parent's unhappiness is a great burden to the child... 1999. Today, my friends, embrace you new lives by sharing yourselves with every living, breathing thing you come into contact with. Laugh with great abandon, when you hug someone today, don't let them pull away first...and tell them so... "Uh-uh, not yet..." Be good to yourselves first, so that you can be good for the world. I love you, Connie. Reenie

Well Connie - as always I sit here thinking "She should be published..." My take on happiness, minus the insight you just brought to the table about it being one's duty (which I think is brilliant), I also believe it is our choice on being happy. Like you said - you do what you can to get there. I will say that having battled depression in the past, it is a weird beast. It's not the same as being unhappy. It's hard to explain. I know I would get told "you just want to be miserable" from some people. I sometimes felt like maybe they were right, but always ultimately got angry at that phrase because it was not true. What was true was that I didn't know how to pull out of it. I was having a huge pity party for myself and I didn't know how to stop. Now, in retrospect, I wonder if maybe that the pity parties we throw ourselves are a way of self-soothing. No one else is offering us the comfort, so we have self-talk that we use to convince ourselves that we've been wronged. To tell ourselves that it's not our fault that we aren't loved or wanted or helped. To give ourselves some sort of shoring up, but in the end it becomes counter-productive because we then wallow in "WHY DOESN'T ANYONE LOVE ME?" and other negative thoughts. When we start finding reasons why people don't want or love us, we start to hate ourselves. Because instead of shoring ourselves up, we are now beating ourselves down. In the book "Blink" that I just recently read, the author touched on second guessing. Most people make the wrong decision when they second guess. The reason, he stated, was because rather than focusing on the snap decision that we know is right because our experience fits all the little pieces into place for us without us having to labor over it, we then focus on the process of elimination. Instead of trying to prove why we are making the right choice, we start trying to prove why we are making the wrong choice and why it doesn't work.....and we spend a lot of time doing it. Then we talk ourselves out of the right decision. Well, that is how it feels to me about this self-soothing. We start out shoring ourselves up...giving ourselves comfort, only to turn it around and make ourselves out to be villans. Somewhere along the line I made a conscious decision to be happy. It's not 100% and I have to keep reminding myself of it. I look at what makes me unhappy and what I obsess on, then I go the opposite direction. When I think about how I can easily get wound up over customer service issues, I realize that it can taint my day or even week. So even though I am right and have been wronged, I now try to just pick my battles. How much money is it worth to make me miserable in fighting this issue? Is it better for me and my mental health to just say "forget it" and eat the cost or the rightness or wrongness of the situation? So I quit fighting, for one. Then I started looking at the big picture. I recently got in trouble at work. It was rather silly but still I got in trouble. I had time to think about it before I was meted out the discipline and I decided it wasn't going to affect me. That doesn't mean I didn't take it seriously, but in the grand scheme of things, I was able to reason out that it was no big deal. I still get to keep my job, I didn't hurt anyone in the process and the letter of instruction is out of my personnel file in a year. My reaction in the past may have been to spend weeks worrying what would happen or wondering what everyone thought of me. I would make myself sick and then I would protest every last detail I felt they were wrong on. Yeah, I still feel they are wrong about some things, but it doesn't matter. I give my mea culpa and act graciously and they are happy and I am walking away feeling none the worse for wear. And now I move on. I had to make up my mind how I was going to deal with this though. As has been the case with many things in my life where I face things that don't quite go my way. I won't always have a positive knee jerk reaction, but I do feel like on those times when I told myself that I wasn't going to get upset, it helped. DH forgets my birthday? Kneejerk reaction would be to get my feelings hurt. But then I think it out and realize he would feel worse than me once he figured it out, and I put myself in his place. Then I feel sorry for him rather than me. Just a small example of how I have learned to do this. Bad things do happen, but good things sometimes take the place of the bad things with time. Had I not gotten fired from one job years ago, I would never have met my husband. I try to keep that in mind and look toward the future rather than mourning the present or past. It's not 100%, but since I started looking at it this way, I've not had depression like I used to have. I can't promise it will be a forever thing, but it feels like I hit on something that helped me. Hopefully all of us will find our stride when it comes to this. Dina

God, How I love this place and you people!!!!!!!!! Where else can you go and recieve such wisdom, insight, just plain old common sense or whatever else you'd like to call it????!!!!! You say that you don't have any answers, Connie.....Balderdash I say!!!! Your conclusion on the subject of happiness is right dead center of the "10 ring"....bullseye as it were!! We were not going to take control of our weight and health until we decided to do it for ourselves. Likewise, we must control our own happiness. No one else can do it for us. Thank you once again for your wonderful musings. I too have been thinking a lot about happiness and depression lately and have come to similar conclusions. There's no way, however, that I could have expressed as well as you have. You're amazing!! Mike

Wow Connie, That all I can say & your timing was wonderful. Mike you are right, this board is amazing. I am on other boards as well & never get as much insight & words of widom & Love as this board gives out. You are all amazing & hope you are all staying around for along time to come. Thanks for all of your words of wisdom. You are great!! Marilyn, the Bearlady

can i join this huge hug??? wow-connie-WOW!!!!! i guess the only thing that i can say is that i had to choose to be happy in order to survive all of the crapola with my hubby's illness this summer-otherwise- well- i don't wanna think about the otherwise..... **he is btw getting better daily---not back to work for a few more weeks...

I just thought of another reason why i'm happy I had the surgery...i get to talk to all of you.

Connie and all my March friends - I was just sticking my head in to see how all my March buddies were doing and I was pulled in by Connie's message topic. As always, her rantings always amuse and interest me. This one was no exception. Happiness is something I'm striving for in my life right now. My marriage is unravelling and has been for the last 2 years. Divorce proceedings are finally underway, and it's not going to be pretty. One of the issues my husband and I discussed a few months ago was my concern for his happiness. I knew that he was not happy and I felt that it was my obligation as his wife to "fix" his problem. He finally told me that he didn't know if he was even capable of being happy. Those words saddened me. I was sad because I want him to be happy and I was sad because I really thought I could change his destiny in some way. I realize now that it is not my responsibility to make anyone happy but myself. I've lived the last 38 years trying to make (and keep) everyone else happy that I've forgotten to worry about my own happiness. I'm a nurturer - it's just what I do. Even as my husband and I go through this bitter divorce, I still try to take care of him - I just can't help myself. I'm finally learning to take care of me. I'm trying to not let myself get so wrapped up in what everyone else thinks about what I'm doing, how I'm doing it and so on. I'm looking out for #1 (finally). I want to own my happiness and if I happen to make others happy along the way, well - that's a bonus. My responsibility to myself is to choose to be happy and I do. I may not have made the best decisions, and I would do some things differently if I had them to do over again, but I'm a damn good person and I deserve to be happy. I'm no longer going to settle for "miserably content" as I have for a while now in my marriage. My children deserve a happy mom - not just someone who merely exists. Reenie is right - it is a heavy burden for a child to bear having an unhappy parent. I want to set a good example for my girls, but at the end of the day, they will have to choose to be happy. I'm here to give them the tools to find their happiness - I cannot hand it to them on a silver platter - it just doesn't work that way. Happiness and peace... -Wendy

Wendy - I'm so sorry to hear about your divorce. It is hard when you are the kind of person who feels personally responsible for other's happiness. I do the same thing. I take it personally when I can't help pull someone out of their sadness. I am happy to see you posting though. I miss seeing your smiling face around here! When are we going to get an updated photo though? Dina