Oh no. It's been a tough few days. I am not keeping up with my shit.
Activity: Blogging with the bestie!
Activity Prompt: Do you have to be happy to live a fulfilling life?
Alone or with partners: Me and bestie!
Drink and snack with activity: Just water. I had vegan halal cart chick'n and I am stuffed.
Physical activities log
Morning ab routine
5 ab roller rolls:Yes
Blogilates morning abs: No - Starting Dec. 30th
Quarter mile walk every hour on the hour, 10-5: I didn't do any of these today, it was raining
10:
11:
12:
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
5PM Two Mile Walk: STARTING IN MARCH
Weighted walking: No -Starting Dec. 30th
Shoulder shrugs during the day: Yes
MON, WED, FRI
45 minutes of PB: Starting Dec. 30th
TUE, THUR
45 minutes of cycling: Starting Dec. 30th
45 minutes of weight lifting: Starting Dec. 30th
Macros
Carbs: 20/23
Fat: 103/144
Protein: 75/116
Calories: 1374/1850
Reflecting on forty years to find long stretches of happiness leaves me coming up empty. I think I was about 13 or 14 when I was admitted to the psych ward for the first time? I asked Amber if that was before or after we became friends, and she said it was after. And that question just...derailed our blogging.We ended up talking instead for 6 hours.
But we didn't talk about the answer we would give to this question.
I've lived with chronic depression for almost 30 years. I was medicated off and on throughout my teens, and nothing I was prescribed worked. I have described almost all of my antidepressants as making me feellikeI was walking through sticky cobwebs with a head full of foggy, dusty clouds. I never felt any more like me when I was on antidepressants and anxialytics, which is a weid thing to say when you've lived your whole life depressed. Did I even know what being me felt like?
Yes? I think I did. At the very least, I know the way I felt WASN'T me. There was a me feeling out there, somewhere, but the many rounds of meds never helped me find it.
I got kicked out of my house for the first time when I was 14, to go live with my dad in Vegas. My dad was married to a wretched woman named Cheryl at the time, she was intensely abusive to me, and perhaps those horror stories will be written about another time, but the most important part of this is how much it ignited my desire to be nomadic. It was thrilling to pack up my day to day normalcy and move that somewhere else. When my parents divorced and we moved from New York to Maryland and finally landing in Florida, I was pretty young and I have no real recollection of how that sat with me. But I do remember getting on planes o go visit my dad back in New York before he moved down to Florida and never feeling scared to travel for a single moment. I loved travel. I loved to see new places and being able to move to a new place was even more exciting. I was crushed when Vegas didn't work out the first go around, for reasons I won't go into but also because Vegas was new and exciting and I wanted to explore it. But Vegas worked out the second time I got kicked out. I lived there for a few years and traveled the surrounding states. Arizona, Utah, California. A boyfriend and I drove out to the salt flats so I could learn to drive, and I fell even more in love with the desert. I went hiking with my dad into mountainous terrain, saw hidden rivers I never would have noticed if I hadn't explored the area. My dad taught me how to climb without equipment because we couldn't afford the permits and we both took the exciting attitude of, "if we die here, at least we die HERE" because Red Rock Canyon was our sanctuary. I have done every single hike in that area, and it made me hungry for more adventures. I picked up and moved in the midde of the night to California when I found out I was pregnant with my oldest, and while I was depressed and unhappy, I was excited to be somewhere new.
I kept moving round, different cities in Northern Cali, back to Florida when my oldest's dad and I split, back to Vegas when I was trying to be close to my oldest, was homeless for awhile, moved to Colorado when I got pregnant with my daughter, and after a thousand crusty relationships, I met my husband.
I am staunchly ani-militry, and it brings me no joy to be married to someone in the military at all. It is a conflicting, painful part of my every day life that I wrestle with on the regular. It makes me unhappy in ways I think I would be hard pressed to keep brief, and this unhappiness weighs on me. But I love my husband passionately and deeply, it's the only way I know how to love anybody. Since being with Derek, he has not just scratched my travel itch, he has given me a joy with travel that I didn't have before. I used travel to escape things, and as exciting as it was to be picking up and mving all the time, I wnted internal solitude more than anything. Under all of my long car trips and decisions to pick up leave was a desire to set roots somewhere because maybe then I would be happy. Maybe stillness meant something good instead of something boring. It was a desire I never ever ever spoke out loud.
Derek and I have traveled little pieces of the world together, we have had so many adventures that I needed to start blogging them to keep all of the memories collected because my brain will ditch them.
When we're not traveling, Dererk understands and supports my need to care for community and be involved in making things more tolerable for others. He supports my participation in the organizations I am part of, he gets excited for me when I find some new cause I can add to my list of things I've thrown myself into, he doesn't even really tell me to pull back when I take moral umbrage with places I work and it weighs so heavily on me that I need to quit. He knows I have to stay true to my personal moral compass, and while he will occasionally remind me that I always say "morality is for the rich", he never stops me, despite our financial struggles, from being aligned with my spirit. I have spent the last few years working to sow good, and build community, and work outside of myself and my family.We have traveled. We cook together, I hyperfixate on a food and I can't rest until I make it and Derek goes with me on these food journies (I've learned canning, fermenting, how to make booze, foraging, gardening, chicken tending...it's been a ride!) and seems delighted by them.
I am fulfilled.
But I do not think I'm happy.
I am happiER than I've ever been, this much is an undeniable fact. I am as close to true happiness as I think I can feel, whatever happiness can mean when we live in the word we live in. I feel the weight of everything fairly constantly. I cry over genocides daily. I weep at the apathy of the world daily. I am angry about my own complicity in these things, how the things I consume are born of violent exploitation. I want to live on a piece of land with a community where we all fill each other's cups and there is an ease and lightness to life where we can enjoy the smell of the air after rain, and the sound of chickens scractching a the wet earth through fallen leaves. I know these are things humanity is capable of, and I feel a deep unhappiness tthat we are colletively choosing to speed run the death of ourselves in the name of capitalism and consumerism. Did you know there's a name for the smell after rain? It's petrichor. A chemical release from the ground that humans are veery very good at detecting. And the sunbeams you see when the sun is rising or setting, the ones that poke through the clouds? Those have a ame, too. Crepuscular rays. I am unable to be happy at the thought of all of the things I will never know because we are all choosing violence.
I am not trying to paint myself as a saint here, and I feel like here will be some sense of judgment at expressing the idea that I cannot be happy because there are things that are happening elsewhere, not to me, and it keeps me from happiness. But I would ask how anybody holding that thought has allowed themselves to become so disconnected to the rest of humanity that the suffering of others isn't carried as personal suffering. Hyperindividualism is moving us toward our demise, where am I meant to be happy there?
I think that joy and happiness are two very different things. I can say that I am fulfilled, and largely this is true. I feel fulfillment at not just wringing my hands at the state of things, but being an active participant in fostering change. I feel fulfillment in talking to people about anarcho-communism and trying t mve the needle oward class consciousness. I take in cats that have been dumped by their previous caretakers and I provide warmth and safety for them, and I feel fulfilled. I have my children, I have my husband, I have my hobbies. I am fulfilled, and I have joy. I experience joy daily. I fall in love with everything, and I am so in love with the way the wind moves, and the laughter I hear from my oldes talking with a friend, and the way my daughter loves to draw, and the way my husband throws himself into projects both for himself and for me, and I daydream about being across the universe who I imagine are daydreaming of me, and I am moved to tears consantly because I am so joyful about these little intricate moments that mean nothing in aggregate and are readily forgotten but as monumental as they happen. I am joyful and ful of hope.
I am fulfilled.
But I am unhappy.
And I do not think unhappiness is a dealbreaker for fullfillment. The two are not synonymous.
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