"When it comes to suffering, she's right up there with Elizabeth Taylor"

I have heard that when you let sunlight into your life, happiness and positivity will follow. I am a cynic who sometimes poses as an optimist. I am also fond of darkness even though I like to be able to enjoy myself during the day. I have spent many years being the person that I am and I don't remember what it was like to have the feeling that sunshine brings. It's odd to always feel the way that I feel. I recognize how my words impact the people around me. I see how it distances them from me. My feelings, which still need validation from time to time, almost seem to get the better of me. They turn me into some kind of "feeling junkie" and I constantly feel the need to be feeling something. Something other than sadness or loneliness. Depression is a hard thing to overcome and whether I am sinking in it or hiding from it, my need to feel something sometimes translates into overcompensation. I need my desires to be front and center in my life. I need people to want to be around me and want to love me, no matter if I don't love myself. It is a hard trade off to want all of those things from others, and yet, never ask the same of myself. Or to give to myself and be for myself, the way that I would like others to do. Letting in sunlight, and giving into change is hard. I have to be able to go from the person that I am to the person that I want to be. In order to make change, I am going to have to do a lot of work.

So...here I am in a new year, contemplating what it means to be a happy person. It's not like writing out a list of things that happy people experience will bring me any closer to the kind of happiness that I am looking for. I have read through those lists; "happy people do these things, happy people don't do these things". To be honest, those kinds of lists are defeating. As soon as I get through a few of the things that happy people do I am shaking my head and wondering who has the time to do those things. But I am committed to change and I am committing to make myself do the things that I need to do in order to become happy with myself. If I have lived 43 years trying to be something that I am not, then what could it hurt trying to be a happy person? Even as I type that out I hear the lyrics from a song flood my brain "I'll be what I am, a solitary man". But I have to fight it. I need to become one of the shiny happy people that I so desperately want to be like. I want to be able to not feel triggered, opinionated, cynical, jaded, and mostly depressed. There is no harm in trying. If I have spent so much time internalizing all of my pain, as well as my hopes and dreams, then I really only have myself to blame. And I am tired of playing the blame game. I haven't moved on with my life because I have been waiting for someone to move along with me. My friends and family have moved on with their lives and they're not really waiting for me to catch up. My Dad doesn't even expect much out of me. So maybe if I stop caring what people think, I'll be able to find my happiness? I think that it's definitely worth a shot.

I know that resolutions have a limited timeline. I started the beginning of the new year with just one thought in my head; no new year's resolutions. I heard somewhere that it was probably best to call your resolutions "intentions" so that you follow through with them in a different way. If you fail with one intention, then you fail. People tend to beat themselves up for failed resolutions. I have beaten myself up many times for many failed resolutions. What I have found with intentions, is that I am allowed to give myself time to follow through with intent. I intend on being a better person. If that means taking the clutter from my life and burying it out in the desert, then so be it. Two weeks ago I finally made good on cleaning out spaces in my apartment. Things that have built up in the back of my head finally hit me like a jolt of lightning and I made myself pack up things that I no longer needed. I made a couple trips to Goodwill to donate clothes and shoes that I haven't worn in years and I felt good. I felt like a weight had been lifted. It was empowering. I knew that if I made more intentions like that, then I would make this new year a better year. Simple as that. Last weekend I opened up another closet and I felt defeated again. I have to remind myself that I intend to get rid of more stuff and clean up my spaces in my own time. It's not like there is a timer hanging over my head.

One of the the things that gets me, that I recognize clearly, is how food affects me. trying to manage a diet and being overweight is such a complicated task. A few years a go, I joined Weight Watchers with the intent of following through with my weight loss goals. I had also joined a gym and found a friend that I could go with. I managed to do food prep and I cleaned out my refrigerator so that I could simplify the process of becoming healthier. It was hard to do. Every Saturday or Sunday I would spend hours cutting fruits and vegetables. I would spend equal amounts of time making food that I would eat throughout the week and I tried desperately to catalog as much as I could. During the week I would meet my friend at the gym and we would do a workout routine that was "designed" for us by one of the employees at the gym who masqueraded as a trainer. I would keep notes and monitor my progress and tell myself that this was going to be the year that I achieved everything that I wanted to achieve. Once a week I attended Weight Watchers meetings. I would stand on the scale with delight as the facilitator would read off my new weight loss. It felt good to finally be able to shed the pounds. I got cocky though. I started giving in to those little temptations. My food prep started to decline from once a week to every other week. My workout buddy and I would spend time working out and then head to a buffet for dinner afterwards. Eventually my workout buddy found less and less time to spend with me and I gave up going to the gym altogether. I let his disinterest determine my productivity and in time I gave up going to the gym as well. Then I started secretly smoking again. I hated that I loved the sensation of smoking and I told myself that I would only do it a little at a time. The lie turned out to be easier to accept, because I was back to buying a pack of cigarettes in a week. My Weight Watchers sessions ended and I thought "well I can do this all by myself". Pretty soon all of those things that I had been doing, I stopped doing. My relationship with food and my slothenly nature came back with full force. When I lost my job last spring, it hit me even harder. Within no time, I put on so much more weight. I had finally accepted defeat and I had given up. 

Without thinking, I decided to take a look at intention. All that I have really ever wanted in life was to be at peace with myself. I hate my inner conflicts and I know that I need to work on them in order to become a better version of myself. What I intend to do over the next few months is to let myself be and not be so hard on myself for giving up. In order for me to change my mind, I am going to have to put in the work to rewire my brain. I have to be willing to give myself a chance in order to let the sunshine into my life. I am pretty sure that I will hit a few speed bumps along the way, but I am pretty certain that I have always hit speed bumps. I'd like to say that my life, without suffering, was lived on my own terms. I can only do that if I start holding myself responsible to the terms that I have outlined for myself. If I can do this, maybe just this one time, I can smile and be happy with myself. All good things start out with the best of intentions anyway. Why not be the best you can be and be okay with it. There is no harm in trying.