Ditching the Need to be Happy 24/7

I'm so sick of thinking there's something wrong with me from the moment I open my eyes.
It's like I've bought into this faulty idea from society that if I play all my cards right, live up to my potential and continually strive to improve my life I will be happy all the time.  Everyday will be magical, full of white light and rainbows.  Synchronistic events will continue to unfold and life will look like a techocolor movie and I will be the protagonist.  Meanwhile back in Jeanne land, I wake up to mixed emotions and some lingering sadness and fear, but ultimately I feel hopeful.

This really should be good enough. It works in the ocean and large bodies of water, the tides fluctuate in temperature, and lakes have warm and cool currents.  I'm always happy and at peace in lakes in the summer and I appreciate swimming through water that has been warmed by the sun and the refreshing cooler water.  So why can't I accept this in my own mental state?

 I'm a moody, colourful, messy artist.  Life is amazing, but it's bittersweet. I've won at love and I've lost.  I'm alone, figuring out my career and how to be happy as a single person.  Yet, I expect perfection from myself, a level of mastery over my thoughts and emotions that seems to be constantly evading my grasp.

The problem comes down to lack of acceptance and an unrealistic expectation that I should be happy all the time or else I'm at risk of a depressive relapse.  Of course thats a scary thing to have to contend with because its been literal hell in the past. Depression is like being stuck in a thunderstorm, and taking shelter under a boulder, only to realize I'm drenched, freezing and trapped.  My soul cry out in agony as I await a guide to lead me to higher ground.

With this past experience, its not surprising that I don't like feeling tired, sad or scared.  Unfortunately for me this is part of life, and I refuse to give into the thought that I can't handle the cooler waters that are a realistic part of the human experience.  I need to accept that waking through adversity with self compassion is the path to freedom.

Without acceptance, there is no recovery.  Life becomes a constant fight within my own mind. There's no point being upset with myself.  I've gone through alot of change.  I walked away from the financial security I had found in my common law marriage.  I lost opportunity, status, money and prestige.
Now I have to find it on my own.  I have to face my ugly self realization that I put men on a pedestal in relationships and business.  That I somehow think I need them to take care of me, when I've been disproving that everyday by becoming successful on my own terms.

So today, I choose acceptance. I chose to love the beautiful, messy and moody monster that I am. I choose to love the scared, self doubting parts of my psyche.  I remind myself that I am enough, that I am worthy and that I can love myself as I transition and grow.

Ghost Children-Another take on Depression

I'm always trying to understand what is going on in my inner landscape and how my perceptions of myself get so distorted and dark.  I like the imagery of my depression as being fragmented parts of my childhood identity that desperately need healing.  They have been silently following me through life and reappear whenever I start to feel intense feelings such as fear or grief.  The suffering these ghosts have caused me over the years is almost unbearable, because I didn't understand what they wanted.

The ghost I want to talk about today is worthlessness and existential angst.  I used to call it Hermie, but really it's just sad little Jeanne.  When life gets tough and I feel powerless, it tries to further steal my light,  saying things like, "nothing matters, no one cares about your feelings, life is pointless etc."

I've come to realize this was how I felt alot as a child.  I recognize the sad eight year old alone in the corner of the playground, wishing she could disappear.  I remember trying to play foursquare with the popular  kids and they would purposely kick me out of their stupid game, by playing unfairly and pretty much throwing the ball at my head.  I heard haha, you're out! loser! etc ways to often.

So what did I do?  Did I tell my parents I got ostracized by my peers every day in elementary school? Nope, because at five years old I decided they were to dysfunctional to confide in so I worked extra hard in school so they could at least me proud of me.  Did I tell teachers? Nope, tattletales aren't well liked and they really didn't understand bullying in the 80's and often gave little kids shit for being antisocial.

So I found a way to cope. I wanted to cry, somedays I did, but more often than not I'd get in trouble for crying or the playground staff would force me to rejoin the bullies.  So I buried my little eight year olds sadness and rejection. I told myself that no one cared about Jeanne, that she shouldn't be sad, that there was something wrong with her and that she didn't fit in.  This was alot to swallow.

I didn't want to be forced to play with the little asshole kids, so I'd read alone in the isolated portal, and if anyone bugged me, I told them I was reading.   No one intervened, this went on for months.
 I read more than  90% of  kids in grade 3-6.  I'd get so completely hyper focused on reading I'd lose track of time,  Pretty soon I'd read all the decent Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and science fiction books in the elementary school library.  My mom took me to the public library and I cleaned up there too.  I read the Lord of the Rings book in one long sitting one day at home, I was so intent on escaping my little person world and living somewhere more magical.

The one cool thing about all of this is that I got really engaged in stories about female heroines, that overcome adversity and this gave my little soul hope and strength.  I desperately wanted to be an alien princess, leading her people through social and environmental challenges on foreign planets.
Anything was better than being me.

I guess what saved me was my strong interest in language and creative arts, because as a child you do what you excel at and you don't have to worry about getting a job.  Later in life, realizing what I got A's in at school wouldn't easily lend itself to finding a career was as damaging to my psyche as bullying, because my natural skill set is not easily remunerated in a capitalist society and money is a form of apprieciation.

Sitting alone in the staircase of the portal the furthest away from my tormentors, I became a ghost of the vibrant divine child I was created to be.  The constant re affirmation I was getting from the other kids that I was different and my feelings didn't matter got deeply engrained in my subconscious.  These are some of the roots of my suffering and depression.  I got the wrong message and continued to tell myself the wrong things when life got tough throughout my adult life.  No one championed little Jeanne, and I live with the ghosts she created.

Luckily I am so much more that my suffering, so much more than my pain.    I can learn to be the mother that the ghost children so desperately needed, and love them for their original pain, but stop believing their faulty beliefs that I am not worthy.  No child should have to live with bullying and not be able to get help.  I just hope that other people can realize that we need to heal our past traumas so that they don't keep showing up as automatic negative thoughts.  When we get to the root of our suffering we can align with the universe and find healing if we stay open and vulnerable and turn towards the light.  We all have the ability to heal if we are willing to shed some of our old ideas and turn our will and lives over to our creator.

Life Lessons-Dealing with Rejection

In my journey towards maintaining good mental health, there are road bumps that can really trigger me and send me backward, and one such trigger is rejection, real or imagined.   Having had several bouts of clinical depression I can be an emotion phobic person.  If life feels painful or I feel sad, I accidentally let the depression gremlin in, because he never turns me down,  but I'm so done with that mindset, so I'm gonna send him packing.

So rejection....not a great feeling right?  Especially for those of us that are emotionally sensitive, have been bullied and on some level question our self worth. As I'm writing this I'm exploring the murky emotional waters that rejection has created in my mental landscape.  It doesn't feel good, I feel sad, alone, tired and vulnerable to depression.  Lucky for me I'm an optimist and I have faith that this too shall pass it I play my cards right.

I hope the people that hurt me don't read this, because its really none of their business how I feel.  They didn't care when they hurt me to know who I really am and where cold and inconsiderate when I needed love the most.

Thats the hard part about all of this, I put my trust and love into people that where unable to reciprocate and I took it personally.  The rejection I'm talking about has been from the men in my life.
It started with my father, he rarely took the time to care about my emotional needs or give me the validation I needed growing up.  Sadly, even today he's short with me on the phone and he's not able to be there for me in crisis situations.  I love my Dad, and I accept this is just life on life's terms.

So I come by the habit of choosing emotionally unavailable men and bad boys honestly, its what I grew up with, its my comfort zone.  If my own father didn't know how to be there for me, why would anyone else?

Lately I've had a string of destructive relationships with men, and I've repeated my parents mistakes in my own first marriage.  It breaks my heart that I could love someone so much and put my heart and soul into a relationship and never get my emotional needs met.  I had to walk away from an otherwise amazing human being, because I didn't want to stay in a relationship that wouldn't allow me to grow.

Being single for the last few months, I haven't done much better with men, and my poor choices resulted in me breaking down in tears last night.  I tried to reconnect with a hot bad ass from my rave days and he was really nasty to me, and because I was at my breaking point I did not handle the perceived rejection well at all.  It was a huge wake up call, no one is gonna make me happy but me, and that at the end of the day, in-spite of being surrounded by great people I am alone with only my higher power for large portions of my journey and its tough changing 34 years of mental habits! Jesus did 40 nights in the desert with the devil, and I think I've outdone his record!

Anyways the point is we attract what we think we deserve and its pretty fucking sad that as I overcome depression and a failed marriage, I think I deserve to be treated like shit by men.  It's pretty harsh that I even expose myself to people that are potentially toxic to me when I'm trying to heal.

At the end of the day, I actually have alot of compassion for all the bad boys and emotionally fucked up men, and I really hope I can respect them and we can eventually get along.

But its time to get real, the person I really need to be best friends with right now is myself and if I know I'm just getting my feet back under me after dealing with heartache and depression, the last think I need is to allow people to kick me when I'm down.

****I want to say a sincere thank you to all the stand up men I've dated and been friends with that treated me well.  It sad to say but I have lost out in love because I didn't always treat the nice guys with the respect they deserved, and I'm the one who lost out in the end.  Some of the amazing men I've dated are now happily married to great women and they deserve the best life has to offer.
 I remember those good relationships with fondness and they serve as reminders I can have great relationships in the future.