But I watched it anyway. Best six minutes of my day.
I've read more books and articles than I can count about how the brain functions, how negative thinking becomes a very real rut, how worrying doesn't do anything but give you serious health problems. I became convinced that my stress reactions were more harmful to my health than French fries and adjusted accordingly. I'm very interested in being a happy person. It's a personal goal. I'm very goal-oriented, just work with me here.
I read somewhere people are happiest while exercising and something else of course I can't remember. I decided they were happy while exercising because when it's burning you can't think about all your problems -- you're concentrating on breathing through the effort. There's just not time to be sad. Or maybe it's endorphins. I don't know, I just make sure I exercise four or five times a week.
I read about how when you're younger, you equate happiness with some sort of ecstasy or emotional high, a very RAH RAH LET'S GET CRAZY AT DISNEYLAND kind of happiness, and when you get older it's more let's sit on the deck and chat over a bottle of wine happiness. I look for moments when I'm relaxed in my day. In the summer, it's the drive back from dropping my daughter off at summer camp. The air is fresh, the windows are down, I haven't fully switched into work mode yet, and the day seems very full of possibility.
Earlier this week, I was up for two hours in the night with the little angel and found myself a puddle on the floor the next day. The day after that, I was fine, having had my seven hours of sleep. It's truly shocking how much being tired or hungry or hot or cold or in pain will do to my mood. Part of happiness, I think, is alleviating physical discomfort so I don't concentrate on it -- or even if I don't concentrate on it, it seems to find its way into my mood without my realizing it -- so part of happiness is tending to my physical needs just like you would a toddler's. Eat regularly, sleep regularly, stretch sore muscles, take headache medicine, layer.
Once my physical needs are met, "happiness" is really "interested." I might be relaxed during my leisure time, but it's not really super satisfying unless I feel like I'm learning something or pondering something or hearing a new story about someone or having a good conversation. Watching boring TV can actually make me cranky, because I have so little free time I hate to waste it on something stupid. I realize how snooty that sounds, but I am pretty demanding about plot when it comes to entertainment. Realizing that has saved me hours of Real Housewives watching.
Last night I fell asleep in the little angel's bed after we read together and she shut off the light. When I woke an hour later, groggy, my plans for writing seemed doomed. I sat at the table and thought about what I wanted to do. Beloved's traveling most of this month for work, so I have a unique opportunity to really focus on my writing in the evenings.
I bemoaned how tired I was. I really didn't want to write. I wanted to couchmelt and watch TV. I did that the night before, though, and I thought how once when I bemoaned that I would be twenty-eight when I finished my master's degree (I know, I know), Beloved pointed out that I'd be twenty-eight someday whether I finished the degree or not, and it's shaped my writing life ever since. I wanted to couchmelt, but I also wanted to have written, to be moving forward on my new novel and be closer to seeing the story emerge from the depths of the well.
So I took out my notebook (longhand works better for me after sitting in front of a damn computer all day) and closed my eyes and pictured the scene. I told myself to just get two handwritten pages. Then the scene became a little clearer and I knew I wouldn't write the whole thing, but I would write to a natural stopping point in the action, and I did, and it was nine and a half handwritten pages, and I was happy.
This morning I saw this article about the most common regrets of the dying, and once again, happiness as a choice came up.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."
I ended up staying up later than I meant to. I'm trying not to get mad at myself for not being perfect -- not eating perfectly, not drinking perfectly, not going to bed on time perfectly, not having my house cleaned perfectly or my yard mowed perfectly. I've found I can't be interesting and perfect at the same time, because doing all those things I just mentioned perfectly takes a tremendous amount of planning and effort. If today were my last day, I wouldn't regret having eaten a peanut butter-slathered bagel for breakfast (which I did), but I would regret it if I didn't write last night. It's the one thing I did all day that was all mine, just for me, and creating something original does, in fact, make me happy.
My parents and sister were down last weekend. Right before they left, my mom looked at me and said, "You seem happy." And she's right -- I am happy fairly consistently right now.
I would say I'm in a good place, only I no longer believe in good places and bad places, only places. One might think I'm happy because my novel just came out, but in actuality, I got totally anxious and angsty when I signed my contract, so good things happening for me professionally don't necessarily translate into good things happening to my mental health. I'm sure that seems ridiculous, but it happens all the time. Look at how many people -- particularly creative people -- fall apart a little right after they get a break. I think change is hard no matter what type of change it is, because it's fucking scary. Putting out a novel means I have to up my game next time, and people will read it and maybe hate it and talk about it -- so many things for my anxiety to grab onto.
I'm actually shocked I'm happy right now. Even though that sounds ridiculous.
Last Saturday I woke up snarly and snarled at Beloved and the little angel before I took her to ballet. As I was sitting there waiting for ballet to be done, I realized how familiar that snarl had felt, how I used to an extremely frequent snarler, and how I had committed to myself and my husband a few years ago to really stop snarling and try to look at the world more optimistically. I'm by nature melancholy, and it's a real effort for me to instantly see the good instead of the bad. However, I've noticed the more I work at it, the easier it is. When I snarled, he responded with, "Why are you yelling at me?" and I didn't know the answer to that question. I think I surprised him because I have not snarled quite like that in so long.
I sat there worrying I'd introduced a new tone into our house that was going to creep back into our lives. I texted him, called him, made sure he knew I didn't mean it and wanted to start the day again. And then we did, and my family showed up, and my mother's takeaway is that I seem happy.
I've learned to work toward happy. I still have mood swings, sometimes very bad ones, but I try not to show my irritability or randomly thrash those around me when my heart beats fast and the hair on the back of my neck stands up for absolutely no reason but my body chemistry. I pray with my daughter, and we talk about the best part of the trip instead of what went wrong, and I pet the cats and wish for the thousandth time I could invent a purring, warm neck wrap to wear around when they aren't available. I try to take advantage of sunny corners the minute I see them, even if it's just for a few minutes. I try to do one thing at a time and give that one thing my full attention.
And even then, sometimes it still doesn't work. Sometimes I find myself deep breathing and staring at the wall without knowing why, and in those times I've learned to ask myself what human need could be met right in that moment that would make me feel better. Am I cold? Am I stiff? Am I thirsty? Am I tired? Would I like some music, less music? Are my clothes itchy?
I tell people I spend as much time managing my anxiety as some people do managing diabetes or asthma. I no longer look at these little breaks as wasting time, because that makes me more anxious, and the faster I can get things under control, the more productive the day will actually be, the more creativity I will be able to bring to my work. If I am not anxious, I won't foist that tone on my household.
And so when my mother told me I seemed happy, I actually took it as a compliment more than an observation. I haven't always been a happy person, but I'm working toward that. I want to be a happy old person one of these days.
This morning I woke up thinking about falling in love. I'm not sure if it was the end notes of a dream or the cozy feeling of coming off three nights spent alone with Beloved and no little angel, but I woke up with that feeling in my throat of the first time someone says, "I think I love you."
A few minutes ago, I read Schmutzie's post on happiness, and I thought about waking up to thinking about love. My husband and I ran into a college kid on our recent trip, and the kid asked if we were married. "Almost twelve years," I said. And this kid, who up to this point had been bragging about getting 98 percent in a class without ever having cracked the book's spine and getting laid the night before glanced over with utter sincerity and said, "That's cool. That really makes me happy, that you guys have been together so long."
Well, son, I'm glad I restored your faith in humanity. Because let me tell you, being in love -- long-term love -- is awesome. It usually feels a little different than the falling-in-love, though, and that's a tough one to swallow. Falling in love lasts, what, a few months at best? Being in love -- now that's a different story. That can last forever.
There are ways to tap into that first-few-months feeling, though. I spent years thinking about that feeling while I was single and realized part of falling in love is getting to know a new person, but if I'm honest with myself, part of falling in love is finding a new audience for your tired old stories, a new person to feel new around. Part of falling in love is feeling interesting again.
Part of falling in love is falling in love with yourself.
Maybe that's part of why artists and performers and writers are so crazy about our work. Creating something new is like getting to tell your stories again, maybe even stories you just learned yesterday, stories you didn't even know you knew. Or maybe they are old stories but nobody yet has received them quite the way you were hoping for.
Falling in love, I think, has little to do with falling in love in the conventional sense.
Falling in love, I think, is being able to tap into the part of you that finds yourself still interesting after all these years.
Turn it up. Relax into it. Happy Thanksgiving.
2011 is almost over. I'm sort of sad to see it go. I've spent this year waiting and watching and biding my time for things to happen. But in the meantime, nothing bad has happened, either. As I've spent the last week thinking over 2011 and what it's been, I realized with great clarity that nothing bad happened this year. Bad things *almost* happened, but then didn't. And maybe with that comes happiness. Perhaps the absence of bad things is really as good as it can be.
That sounds more pessimistic than I mean it to be.
After a frustrating time, Beloved got a new job. It has him away more than I'd like him to be, but I'm happy to see he is engaged and interested in what he's doing. Though I haven't written about it much here, I've been very hard at work on my first real novel. It's one of the things I've been waiting about, and there were many times in this year that I wondered really what I should do about it, if I should do anything about it, so I just took critiques and revised and waited and sent it out and waited and revised it some more. And at BlogHer Writers '11, I solidified what I want the next novel to be and started an outline. It's not ready to come out yet, but it's there, humming below the surface in between drafts and revisions of my first novel, just waiting to be born. I keep asking it to please wait a little longer until I can push this first-born novel out of the nest. It is impatient.
Chateau Travolta unexpectedly got a new roof in 2011, thank you, hail storm. We've had Petunia the cat now longer than we had the monster-eating Bella, which sort of blows my mind. Somehow, while I wasn't paying attention, that milestone ticked over and she became more dear to me even though the vet hates her and my niece thinks she is the cat who only says HISS.
The little angel and I took down the Christmas decorations today, and as I put them away I realized how much she has grown since we moved to Chateau Travolta the year she was three and still in a toddler bed. Somehow -- while I wasn't paying attention -- she became a girl who is in second grade and wears skinny jeans and sings along to the radio and wears an apron and takes my order for dinner. In seven more years, she'll be close to getting a learner's permit and the car will be paid off and we'll all have our Internet passwords embedded in a small chip implanted behind our left ears. My parents will be in their mid-seventies and I will be almost 45 and maybe we'll all have subsidized healthcare. Or maybe the world really will end in 2012 and the aliens will find our tweets and wonder what the hell #shitmydadsays means, but certainly it must have been a prophet of some sort for all the attention we paid it. The Kardashians will be on their 52nd plastic surgery and cars will fly, but not mine, because I'll hold on to that Corolla for dear life and we'll finally have paid off the move of 2007.
When I think back over 2011, a lot of things happened to the people around me but not a lot happened to me, and that's okay. Because nothing really bad happened to me, either, and perhaps now that I'm 37 years old and almost 38, I've come to appreciate the lack of bad nearly as much as the abundance of good, because good can also be peaceful hamburgers on the deck when the light turns gold in summer and Christmas lights that all work and a furnace that still functions and a soft bed. I appreciate all that so much more than I did before I learned how easily it can all go up poof, like that, just like that.
It's almost 2012, and I'm still waiting for some things I've worked on so hard to come to fruition. There were many, many nights in 2011 that I cried over the waiting. But when I really think about it, maybe the waiting itself contributes to happiness, because when it finally comes, it will feel so much better than if it had just fallen in my lap.
Here's to the upcoming year. Here's to hoping you get what you're waiting for.
This week, some stuff happened that caused me great anxiety. As the stress washed over me, I tried to ride it out like a wave. I tried to put it in perspective. And actually, for one of the first times, it worked. Not to say I haven't gone back and forth a bit, but life is like that, and human beings aren't static -- nothing about us is static.
I talked to a few friends and family members about my reaction, which I have learned in the grand scheme of things is actually more important than the event -- the repercussions of my reactions last far longer than the crises. The general consensus seems to be that 2011 Rita is really handling things far better than 1992 Rita or even 2007 Rita. Wow, 2011 Rita, they said. You get down with your bad self.
I thought this morning as I was driving home from dropping off my girl at summer camp that great friends are like that: They are our mirrors. My friends reflect back to me not a glamorized version of myself flawlessly executing under any degree of pressure, but the real version, the version who sometimes wins and sometimes loses but is always someone they regard with love.
Because they accept me with all my flaws, it means even more when they tell me they are proud of me. Because they have seen every iteration -- in one case, every iteration since I was three years old -- they are even better judges than I am of my progress or lack thereof.
Having these people in my life -- my husband, my family and friends -- brings forth the best me, better behavior than I would exhibit left to my own devices in the depths of my psyche (which would far prefer a bag of Doritos and a stack of John Hughes movies or perhaps a baseball bat and some windows). I recognize all the time that wanting to show these people I love that I can do it keeps me moving forward most of the time.
It's weird that I was thinking all this before this latest series of events occurred when I wrote my review of Terry McMillan's Getting to Happy (it's the sequel to Waiting to Exhale) for BlogHer Book Club. Even then, I wrote:
And that's what I found with the women of Getting to Happy. You get to happy, then you get to sad, then you fight your way back to happy again. The triumphs don't last any longer than the falls, but the reverse can also be true.
Normally I would've tried to find some witty way to tie back this post to a review that I wanted to tell you all about anyway, but today it's so organic as to be shocking even to me. We are all trying to get to happy. And it, by definition, is elusive, because it, by definition, is relative.
Does it seem like there is a black cloud hanging around? I've had a lot of friends and family members with bad news lately. It seems like everyone's company is laying people off, cutting costs, tightening belts and generally making life miserable. The gas prices have finally gotten high enough to make people think twice about traveling. The airlines suck ass. Traveling this summer just doesn't even sound fun. The weather is insane, and heading into tornado and hurricane season is frightening. I have a headache like every damn day from the barometric pressure constantly changing. THE WATER IS TOO WET AND THE ICE IS TOO COLD.
Crabby, crabby, crabby.
Which is bizarre, really, because in my own life things are really good. A year ago, we moved into Chateau Travolta after a horrible experience selling This Old House and my husband's job was miserable. My beloved cat Sybil died of kidney failure. In comparison, 2008 FUCKING ROCKS. So what gives with my headaches and crankiness?
Here's a lightning bolt: I used to think (I know, I know, rookie) that if I were to get a book published, it would change everything. I would never again have a bad day. I would always be on Cloud Nine. I would never fight with my husband, my child would flit from flower to flower like a red-headed butterfly. Everything would be grand, forever and ever, amen. Ridiculous, right?
But how many people really believe that shit? That if only you had bigger boobs or thinner thighs or a million dollars or a husband that everything would be all hunky-dory all the time? I never thought I'd fall prey to that, because after recovering from an eating disorder in my youth I realized that being a size 2 really just meant I was fucking hungry all the time. It didn't fix anything. So I kind of thought I was immune to this sort of fantastical thinking.
I'm elated about my book coming out in a few months. I'm really, really excited about the book tour (widget coming soon with dates). My beloved has been so supportive and wonderful about this dream of mine as it spun toward fruition that I've fallen in love with him all over again in the past few months. We're remodeling the house we always wanted to have, cigarette-burned carpets and all. I have a new cat, who, while not Sybil, is a very loud purrer and quite cuddly. My husband has a different job that he really enjoys and whistles a lot. The little angel has adjusted to her new daycare and is looking forward to going most days. She can draw a rabbit and write any word if you tell her the letters to use. She can read certain names and short words. Things are good.
But you know what? There are still bad days. Tonight I came home with this killer barometric-pressure headache, knowing I had some reviews to do and that I was overwhelmed at work and it was only Monday. The little angel wouldn't eat her dinner and the old truck wasn't starting very well. When I went to fill the bathtub, the shower was left on BY ME and drenched the top of my head. Not the front, not that back, just the top, which looked totally cool and felt EVEN BETTER. I couldn't find the Advil. I tried to find the swimming suit and water shoes for tomorrow's "water play day" at my daughter's school, but she wanted the Crocs and I could only find one goddamn Croc, and she insisted the Dora shoes WOULD NOT DO and I wanted to tell her about all the little children in the world who don't have shoes and get parasites through their feet, but then thinking about those little children made me want to cry and it isn't even that time, seriously. I'm just low on batteries this week. And the IRS sent us a letter saying we messed up a box on our 2006 tax return and we owe them $390 yesterday.
So no, getting a book published didn't fix everything. It just felt really good to achieve a life goal. The end.
In a way, though, it's freeing. I mean, if that's the case, if realizing a dream I've had my entire life didn't fix everything, that means that nothing will fix everything, and this is as good as it gets, these little minutes, and maybe I should stop worrying about the big, grandiose achievements I always think will finally make me happy. Maybe I am already happy, or I would be, if I could just find the damn Advil.
Or something.
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Teach your teen to stop hating her thighs. Read the book review at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews. Also! I wrote about oral sex today at BlogHer. Seriously.