Learning and Owning your Sadness in pursuit of Happiness

I read this article this week and it truly resonated with me.

The Secret of Happiness? Stop Feeling Bad About Being Unhappy.

Now while I make a conscious attempt to be fun and bubbly most of the time, the reality is...wait for it...I cannot and am not high on life every day. Yes, I preach the whole 'life is beautiful' spiel because I truly believe it is and you just need to pick up a newspaper, turn on the news or talk to friends or random people to appreciate the blessings in your own life as compared to the horrors in our world.

But that is just it. The world itself is not a utopia. The world is a dark, grim place where people hate each other so much that they lie, attack each other, kill each other, start wars and the like. Where mothers look at their toddlers while they sleep, eyes filled with love and hearts with gratitude for this small blessing in their lives but still ponder and sometimes feel a bit guilty for bringing them into a world where we have to reaffirm that black lives matter or girls are awesome or gays have rights too, because so many are still ignorant or dismissive of these facts.

And these are global issues, which filter down to your own lives in Trinidad, New York, Nassau or Pretoria because you cannot divorce your personal lives from the psychosis around us.

But getting off the cloud above it all and coming back to the space where you, the mother, wife, sister, daughter, employee, friend, person are living his or her own life right now, at this moment - you have your own personal problems.  We all have problems. Full stop. Punto finale. We wake up each day and we face one thing or another - exhaustion, dead end job, screaming kids, bills, loneliness, cheating spouse, illness, death, fear - the list goes on. Recently, in supporting two friends, I encouraged them both to work through their sadness on their own time. Too many times, we get frustrated with friends and relatives when we feel they are wallowing in the murkiness of their experience for too long. But that's just it - it is their experience, not ours. Where I would have a concentrated, contracted period of darkness, another person may need months to get past the hurt from a similar event. I know a guy whose son died in a freak accident almost 15 years ago, and he just never truly recovered from that until his grandson was born recently. Now the light in his eyes is finally shining again - after 15 years.

We edit life every day - we post photos of happy moments on Instagram or Facebook; photos of cocktail hours with friends or vacations or special moments with significant others. We rarely, if ever, post photos of the darkness - when we sit alone in a room and cry, or we are so depressed we cannot get off the couch. And that's okay because that is our truth. The universal truth though is that pain is just a part of life and we must accept that. To me, pain allows us to cherish the happy moments. They go hand in hand. A world that pushes happiness down our throats, without acknowledging that it is unrealistic to always be on top of our emotions, almost making us feel bad about being unhappy, is a world that creates us to feel badly about ourselves, makes us envy others, makes us edit our narrative to promote an unrealistic image of who we are.

I go into deep, dark places sometimes. Deep, dark places. I edit. It is my truth. I don't have to share it with the world if I don't want to. I don't claim to be the happiest woman alive. I accept that I cannot be 'up' all the time. When I am not 'up', I want others to appreciate that I am human and I have hurt and pain and fear as much as I have all this love to give. I cannot dismiss how I feel because you have placed an expiration date on my emotions. We can be happy. We can be content. But we can also be unhappy and constantly searching for answers to life's many questions. That's okay. We don't dwell on it but we accept it. I accept my truth.

That's it for today

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Finding Balance

I took this photo this morning to prove the point that I clearly spend way too much time at the office. Yet, I can say,"Thank God, I have a job". Sure, I probably work too much, and I know I complain about working too much but I am still pretty grateful. Yesterday I actually "celebrated" my 2-year work anniversary. On the one hand, it seems like I have been at this job for 200 years and not just 2. But on the other hand, it seemed like it was just yesterday, I packed my winter jackets, boots and scarves and moved back to Trinidad, after a mostly awesome 14 months in London. I had not even unpacked my bags before I headed to interviews and was in a position to consider not one, but a few job offers. Some wait months and months before they even get called for an interview. I had not even had time to really wait, as in a matter of days, before bags were even unpacked, I was signing jobby job documents. So I try not to complain too much, too often.

However, I decided to try to map how my various roles match up to each other right now, and it was pretty pathetic. As an employee, I am probably pretty awesome in terms of the amount of time I invest in that role. This indirectly correlates to my role as super diva which I try to maintain since one must always be fabulous, even if that means, dragging one's self off the bed after only 3 hours' sleep (damn you, "Scandal") and taking the dressing table to the office to ensure you don't look like roadkill, cause lemme tell you, my reflection in the office bathroom mirror pre-prep was less than outstanding.

Beauty in a bag. Saving the world from the shock of my nashy appearance, one flat iron stroke at a time.

As an aunt, for example, while love-wise I am top of the charts, in terms of the time I am investing in that role, I am right now, Bad Aunty/Absent Aunty. Same goes for daughter (though I am not that bad here), sister (really bad sister), friend (meh). The employee time drains the energy from me, and this impacts the other time. I get home after work and go straight to bed, hardly ever making time for the other folks.

In doing this little exercise I realise that while the roles are all important and go hand-in-hand, the attention investment is unbalanced. These are the reminders I need to remember to scale it back. I do it today and then two weeks later, I fall back into the same pattern. After my little health scare, I was scaling it back pretty consistently. For a while. However, I have left the office not just late, but very late every single day this week, and worked at home last weekend. Sometimes it cannot be helped, but sometimes, you can just make the conscious decision to just pick up the bag and stick to the plan. I now just don't consider my health, but also the people around me, who need a little "me" time with ME.

This is how happiness grows.

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100 days of Happiness

What does happiness mean to you?

It should not be complicated and often we make happiness complicated. We take drastic steps towards this state of being that can  be achieved by just being kind to a stranger or giving a friend a hand.

Just wanted to share this project with you, which a friend and her team are spearheading - to make Trinidad and Tobago smile, and I am extending it to everyone else because happiness is contagious and the world needs more of it.

Click on the link below to sign up and to join me on this adventure. Check out the video to learn more from my girl, Michelle, on the genesis of this project. And have a happy weekend!!

The 100 days of happiness adventure

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