I chose to lead a happy life full of joy and wonder

I’m sitting out in a hammock in the woods of West Virginia right now listening to Keith Urban in the foreground and a beautiful stream in the background and wanted to babble on about how incredible everything is. I think about that movie Office Space from time to time and that guy who was like “every day is just a little worse than the day before so every day of my life is literally the worst day of my life” and I remember seeing that back in the day and thinking “huh, I’m kind of opposite of that.” I mean, maybe not literally every day is better than the last, but definitely year by year. I’d say sixth grade was probably the worst year of my life and ever since then, with the exception of 2020, every year has been better than the previous for me.
And I wonder how many other people feel like this. I hear so many comments about how you grow old and bitter, but I don’t think that’s at all a rule. It’s a choice.
I chose to lead a happy life full of joy and wonder. It wasn’t magic or God or white privilege. I took charge of my life and decided to see things the way I want to see them. It took a while to figure it all out but I did it.
When I was a kid, I thought I would be doing good if I had a few friends who cared about me and I owned my own home and maybe had my weight under control. Now in my 40s I have a huge network of friends that I never could have imagined as a child, I own multiple houses, and I feel healthier than I did in my teens.
Everyone talks about the wealth gap in modern times, and I agree it’s very important and should be addressed, but why do people so rarely talk about other kinds of social gaps, like the confidence gap.
When I think back to my younger self and compare him to who I am now, it’s like the now me would have been inconceivable to my young self. I was so deep in depression and lacked self confidence that I couldn’t have even written a story about someone like who I am now. It was like I believed people like me didn’t exist, like maybe that belief was the reason why I didn’t try to work on myself. Like if you believe all those happy people are just fakers, then you can just slip deeper into your depression, and blame everything on the universe so you don’t need to work and think to improve your life.
I recall once, and I think I wrote about this somewhere else on this site, but I took shrooms once in my younger years and couldn’t seem to escape the depression. I got so mad at God for making me depressed, which is ridiculous because I was an atheist.
As it usually does with young males, my depression usually manifested as anger and I decided that fine, if God or the universe or whatever is gonna make me so depressed then fine, I’m gonna be depressed so I dove deep into it and deliberately dove as deep as I could into the misery, anger and loathing just as deep as I could go. Went to a graveyard and had a meltdown for an hour or two, but then as I walked back, something slowly shifted, and I started feeling a new kind of joy that I hadn’t really experienced before. I remember putting on Weird Al Yankovic and dancing as I came down from the trip.
But after that I had this idea that everything was better now. I had the breakthrough, now I can just coast through life.
That was my mistake. Instead, I should have continued doing that. Maybe not with the shrooms, but definitely exploring all avenues of my emotions, even the dark and terrifying ones. But most people do not do that. Our whole culture is designed around not exploring our true emotions.
Escape into TV, food, politics, religion, drugs, booze, sex, shopping or whatever other addiction we can think of to distract us from who we truly are inside.
I’m working away from that. I’m taking charge of my life as the tagline for my app says.
It takes a lot of courage to go against society like that, but the more I do it the more I see the benefits. And I’m still learning. I do definitely feel like I’ve quote-unquote “made it” or “won at life”.
I live in a magical wonderland of unicorns and rainbows compared to most Americans. Everyone loves each other and sings kumbaya in my world.
Funny how life pokes you–just as I wrote that last sentence I got a text from someone harassing me trying to buy one of my houses. They just won’t leave me alone. I’ve blocked maybe a thousand numbers at this point and they still contact me without my consent every day, relentlessly trying to buy my homes with insulting low ball offers. It’s a predatory and disgusting activity that manipulates money away from good hard working Americans and dumps it into the hands of huge investment firms. I feel guilty enough as a one person landlord. That’s not right that huge corporations should own all our individual homes, but that is the direction we are heading in our country.
But what you do when you’re emotionally healthy and something like this happens is you don’t need to get all pissed off–I mean to be fair I did get kind of pissed off there for a minute :)– but you think it through and get information about it and make a plan to deal with it and create healthy boundaries and create solid plans for how you are going to enforce those boundaries, and learning to accept that you sometimes need to make sacrifices to enforce those boundaries.
I’m wealthy enough I can more than afford a second phone line to deal with this issue.
Okay, now that my train of thought has been thoroughly derailed, I’ll jump back to how this relates to Allihence and the book I wrote called Daughter that took me 25 years before I truly felt like the story was complete. That story is such a part of me, and Allihence’s core character trait was how she wrote her journal every day in the midst of all the chaos going on around her. She would tell the story sometimes literally as it was happening, and that’s how I want this to feel, like I’m telling it as it happens.
And I’ve got to commit to it. I always used a journal as an outlet for pain. I think that’s common. Then when life goes well for you, you forget all about your journal, so the people reading about you a thousand years from now think your life is nothing but misery.
But happy journal entries I think can be every bit as valuable as the sad ones.
Cuz it feels like our whole society, all we know how to do is run from sadness without ever stopping to experience joy.

written on Saturday August 24

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