Love and Happiness
It seems that most of us in our journey through life, are constantly seeking a comfortable and resounding definition for “love” and “happiness”. I can look back at my life so far and definitely see a steady evolution of these terms that are so crucial to my life and purpose. As a child, love meant comfort, security, learning, closeness, understanding and respect. Sometimes love hurt, but knowing love meant that it would always end up okay. Happiness during that time was simply fun and laughter. Finding enjoyment in the smallest and simplest of things (like playing with my little brother on a huge cardboard box in our footed P.J.s so we’d slip every time we “climbed the mountain” and laughed hysterically).
As a teenager, love meant confusion, infatuation, extreme emotions, and even sometimes sadness and anger. Love expanded from just family to boyfriends. Love hurt. Love was questioned, many times. Happiness for me was even more convoluted. At one time, I felt I could control my own happiness, that it could come from within. As a teenager struggling with mental illness on top of normal teenager struggles, happiness became something that seemed very sporadic and uncontrollable. Happiness was dulled and numbed by medications and overwhelming feelings of confusion, pain and misdirection. I depended on outside sources for my happiness and therefore it became scarce and felt unreal.
As a young adult becoming a mother, love and happiness took a sharp turn for the better. They were beautiful and profound. Both gave me a newfound source of vitality and life that I hadn’t known for years. With such a shift in my perspective on life, I grew more in those few first years than I think any other time in my life. It’s hard to explain with words what happiness and love felt to me at this point, because both gained so much depth. But I guess that’s one way to describe them – they were deep emotions and beliefs that completely overcame me, and my soul buzzed with positivity and aspiration. Everything I did was for love and happiness – for my daughter.
Love and happiness soon became tainted with new and more intrusive relationships. Dating for me at this time took on a whole new meaning. Now I wasn’t just exploring potential suitors for myself, but a co-parent for my child. Defining love and happiness in the context of a relationship is a tricky thing, because it’s contingent now on two people instead of one. Your experience with this other person really effects how you define these terms. Of course there are happy moments and of course you feel love, otherwise the relationship would quickly dissolve. But often times when you’re young and ignorant of what your heart really wants and needs in a partner, it’s easy to force an image of what “love” and “happiness” are to fit what you have in your relationship, versus the other way around. You focus on the positives and try to ignore the negatives – even if the negatives may heavily outweigh the positives. It’s not that you’re in a relationship with someone terrible. It’s that you’re in a relationship where, for whatever reason, things aren’t coming as naturally as you’d like them to. You always have the option of continuing it, even if it’s painful or destructive to both of you. But you also have the option of believing that if you let go of something that is a struggle to make work, you might find that with time and personal growth, you get to experience something that more naturally fits. A lot of it is time, a lot of it is you personally getting to know and understand what your heart wants and needs. And some of it is just being in the right place and the right time, and believing there is someone out there who fits what you have decided is your definition of love and happiness … naturally.
My next experience was the best. It was finding how to love and be happy with myself. Not relying on anyone else to provide for me. Finding the source within. It’s not an easy process to go through, but it was completely worth it. It took about a year to finally let go of the idea that my love and happiness would come when I found “the one” or when A, B, or C happened. But with time and a lot of work, I arrived at such an amazing and peaceful place where I was truly happy. I was completely content with my life, just as it was. Which doesn’t mean, by the way, that I was done working on improving myself or my livelihood. But that I was okay with the process and wasn’t only waiting for the destination. I wasn’t putting my life on hold, waiting for something external (of which I had no control) to happen. I focused on my internal happiness and the rest followed. It was the best thing that I ever did for myself and changed my life.
Once I was able to find this peace, I was also able to clearly identify what I wanted in a perfect lifelong partner. I wasn’t in a hurry to find him, I just wanted to identify him to the Universe, mostly to make known that I actually knew this time what I was looking for and could spot it if I saw it. Sure enough… not long after I did this, I spotted him. Well I guess he spotted me, technically. Or maybe the Universe just noticed that we were both finally ready for each other and gave each of us a hearty shove towards each other (now with open eyes).
Now, here’s the lesson I’m currently in.
Once you’ve found true love and true happiness, what does that look like and how long does it look like that? Again, remembering that I’m supposed to be content with the journey, not the destination, I guess I should have known better. It’s not as simple as, “Yay! I found “it” and now I can lay back and enjoy “it” for the rest of my life.” Which is kind of the mode I automatically went in. The first 6 months of this new and beautiful relationship was, frankly, easy. Easy peasy. Easy, natural, light, lovey-dovey, perfect. But of course that never lasts – I mean, it can’t. That’s not life. That’s (hopefully) the afterlife. Life has such a fantastic way of all of sudden, out of nowhere, smacking you across the face and letting you know it’s time to wake up to reality. If it didn’t, what would be the point? It can’t always be easy otherwise there are no opportunities to learn and grow and evolve. You need challenges for you to improve your tactics. Life is in constant change and it’s our job to keep up or get left behind. And I, for one, really want to keep up – in fact, if I could find a way to stay on top of it that would be even better. Plus I consider myself stronger for overcoming those challenges, than if I hadn’t had any and remained stagnant my whole life (which some people may be okay with).
So my challenge now, is constantly recreating a content and “perfect” love. And remembering and rediscovering that contentment and “perfect” happiness. Especially now that I feel like I’ve found them.
Both of these now involve my relationship with the man I love, my relationship with my daughter and now his daughters, which with every day, feel closer and closer to me. But it’s not just love and happiness through relationships. I’m discovering more about myself – more challenges – that are making it difficult to maintain the love and happiness I have created within me. I have felt as though I have been physically broken in so many ways over the past few years. Although I am young, healthy and active, I still have suffered from chronic back pain and other physical ailments with no explanations or answers. However I just recently discovered I have fibromyalgia. I won’t go into detail here, but I suffer from pretty much all of the symptoms and although a little scary and unknown, the diagnosis was a relief to finally have a central cause for all my “problems”. And good to know I’m not crazy. : ) Nonetheless, it still presents new challenges to rediscover my internal love and happiness for myself and others.
As a teenager, love meant confusion, infatuation, extreme emotions, and even sometimes sadness and anger. Love expanded from just family to boyfriends. Love hurt. Love was questioned, many times. Happiness for me was even more convoluted. At one time, I felt I could control my own happiness, that it could come from within. As a teenager struggling with mental illness on top of normal teenager struggles, happiness became something that seemed very sporadic and uncontrollable. Happiness was dulled and numbed by medications and overwhelming feelings of confusion, pain and misdirection. I depended on outside sources for my happiness and therefore it became scarce and felt unreal.
As a young adult becoming a mother, love and happiness took a sharp turn for the better. They were beautiful and profound. Both gave me a newfound source of vitality and life that I hadn’t known for years. With such a shift in my perspective on life, I grew more in those few first years than I think any other time in my life. It’s hard to explain with words what happiness and love felt to me at this point, because both gained so much depth. But I guess that’s one way to describe them – they were deep emotions and beliefs that completely overcame me, and my soul buzzed with positivity and aspiration. Everything I did was for love and happiness – for my daughter.
Love and happiness soon became tainted with new and more intrusive relationships. Dating for me at this time took on a whole new meaning. Now I wasn’t just exploring potential suitors for myself, but a co-parent for my child. Defining love and happiness in the context of a relationship is a tricky thing, because it’s contingent now on two people instead of one. Your experience with this other person really effects how you define these terms. Of course there are happy moments and of course you feel love, otherwise the relationship would quickly dissolve. But often times when you’re young and ignorant of what your heart really wants and needs in a partner, it’s easy to force an image of what “love” and “happiness” are to fit what you have in your relationship, versus the other way around. You focus on the positives and try to ignore the negatives – even if the negatives may heavily outweigh the positives. It’s not that you’re in a relationship with someone terrible. It’s that you’re in a relationship where, for whatever reason, things aren’t coming as naturally as you’d like them to. You always have the option of continuing it, even if it’s painful or destructive to both of you. But you also have the option of believing that if you let go of something that is a struggle to make work, you might find that with time and personal growth, you get to experience something that more naturally fits. A lot of it is time, a lot of it is you personally getting to know and understand what your heart wants and needs. And some of it is just being in the right place and the right time, and believing there is someone out there who fits what you have decided is your definition of love and happiness … naturally.
My next experience was the best. It was finding how to love and be happy with myself. Not relying on anyone else to provide for me. Finding the source within. It’s not an easy process to go through, but it was completely worth it. It took about a year to finally let go of the idea that my love and happiness would come when I found “the one” or when A, B, or C happened. But with time and a lot of work, I arrived at such an amazing and peaceful place where I was truly happy. I was completely content with my life, just as it was. Which doesn’t mean, by the way, that I was done working on improving myself or my livelihood. But that I was okay with the process and wasn’t only waiting for the destination. I wasn’t putting my life on hold, waiting for something external (of which I had no control) to happen. I focused on my internal happiness and the rest followed. It was the best thing that I ever did for myself and changed my life.
Once I was able to find this peace, I was also able to clearly identify what I wanted in a perfect lifelong partner. I wasn’t in a hurry to find him, I just wanted to identify him to the Universe, mostly to make known that I actually knew this time what I was looking for and could spot it if I saw it. Sure enough… not long after I did this, I spotted him. Well I guess he spotted me, technically. Or maybe the Universe just noticed that we were both finally ready for each other and gave each of us a hearty shove towards each other (now with open eyes).
Now, here’s the lesson I’m currently in.
Once you’ve found true love and true happiness, what does that look like and how long does it look like that? Again, remembering that I’m supposed to be content with the journey, not the destination, I guess I should have known better. It’s not as simple as, “Yay! I found “it” and now I can lay back and enjoy “it” for the rest of my life.” Which is kind of the mode I automatically went in. The first 6 months of this new and beautiful relationship was, frankly, easy. Easy peasy. Easy, natural, light, lovey-dovey, perfect. But of course that never lasts – I mean, it can’t. That’s not life. That’s (hopefully) the afterlife. Life has such a fantastic way of all of sudden, out of nowhere, smacking you across the face and letting you know it’s time to wake up to reality. If it didn’t, what would be the point? It can’t always be easy otherwise there are no opportunities to learn and grow and evolve. You need challenges for you to improve your tactics. Life is in constant change and it’s our job to keep up or get left behind. And I, for one, really want to keep up – in fact, if I could find a way to stay on top of it that would be even better. Plus I consider myself stronger for overcoming those challenges, than if I hadn’t had any and remained stagnant my whole life (which some people may be okay with).
So my challenge now, is constantly recreating a content and “perfect” love. And remembering and rediscovering that contentment and “perfect” happiness. Especially now that I feel like I’ve found them.
Both of these now involve my relationship with the man I love, my relationship with my daughter and now his daughters, which with every day, feel closer and closer to me. But it’s not just love and happiness through relationships. I’m discovering more about myself – more challenges – that are making it difficult to maintain the love and happiness I have created within me. I have felt as though I have been physically broken in so many ways over the past few years. Although I am young, healthy and active, I still have suffered from chronic back pain and other physical ailments with no explanations or answers. However I just recently discovered I have fibromyalgia. I won’t go into detail here, but I suffer from pretty much all of the symptoms and although a little scary and unknown, the diagnosis was a relief to finally have a central cause for all my “problems”. And good to know I’m not crazy. : ) Nonetheless, it still presents new challenges to rediscover my internal love and happiness for myself and others.
As far as my relationship goes… Once you’ve had a taste of how good it can be, it really sucks to be anywhere but there. And inevitably, you will be all over the board with how happy you are and how much love you recognize. But the real challenge for me right now, is staying true to what I know, deep down in my heart and soul, is my “perfect” love and happiness. Even if moment-by-moment life changes and offers up something new and different, I want to fall back on the notion that I have found my source – inside and outside of myself – that offers what I want to maintain for the rest of my life. Even if at times those ideas are challenged, I want and need to find a foundation that I can trust.
Once you find it, if you abandon your foundation every time it’s in question, you’ll go through your entire life in constant battles of what you think is true love and happiness. For me, it’s my job to identify the sources that are as closely matched to my internal, decided upon definitions of love and happiness and hold on to them through thick and thin. I still expect my definitions to continue to evolve, but having built the groundwork and baseline for them to always fall back on is a very comforting place to be.
Once you find it, if you abandon your foundation every time it’s in question, you’ll go through your entire life in constant battles of what you think is true love and happiness. For me, it’s my job to identify the sources that are as closely matched to my internal, decided upon definitions of love and happiness and hold on to them through thick and thin. I still expect my definitions to continue to evolve, but having built the groundwork and baseline for them to always fall back on is a very comforting place to be.
I am digesting this jennie. I will comment further when I re-read it...so much wisdom. You seem leaps and bounds ahead of me in this self-discovery. I miss you so much...I long to sit with you and just talk. This seems like a conversation we've had a million times, getting to the point where we figure it all out, but never quite did. And here you've done it. You've figured it out. Wow. Excellent writing my friend.
ReplyDeletelove YOU!