finding happy

Last spring, I realized that I wasn’t happy. This was scary to admit to myself and scarier still to share with my husband (which took place in a restaurant with me ugly crying the whole time and not caring who saw) in a way that he’d understand it wasn’t because of him. See…I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I was feeling that way. Admittedly, 2023 was a difficult year for me in many ways but that wasn’t it. It was deeper and wider than I could grasp and any time I thought I had a handle on the “why” of it, I was left trying to hold on to fistfuls of fog.

Like many people, I searched online. I Googled, I Bing’d, I WebMD’d. More fog. I finally got a bit of eye-opening from YouTube via some very insightful counselors and podcasts and, after devouring the content on their channels, started gaining a bit of awareness into the roots of my unhappiness and while this was helpful on some levels, I still found myself eating the shit of my past and pretending it was a gourmet meal.

And then, this past August, something beautiful happened in the form of a 3-day $7 workshop. I learned that I’d gotten so used to living in and relating to others from my past that I’d been looking at said past to see what could be possible for my future when what I really needed was to learn how to create from my future…not from my past.

FUCKING. LIGHTBULB.

My husband said it would be like riding a rickety, rusted, hand-me-down tricycle and trying to turn it into a Maserati (he’s a car guy) – an impossible task and yet I so get the visual. When you’ve been living in a dark place for so long you have to decide if it’s going to be a burial or a planting and, as I’ve always been partial to plants, I choose to see the lush and fragrant garden of my future and begin to create it now, every day, one blossom at a time.