Entirely Too Soon to Tell

As recently as yesterday, I was tending to suicidal ideations and paranoid thoughts in my head.  As recently as three days ago, I was ready to go to inpatient hospitalization.  As recently as last week, I had spent the past three months in tears, every single day, for at least three to four hours, off and on.  For, it seems, the very longest time, maybe up to a year, even, with a few brief respites, I have fared with quite poor mental and emotional stability.

It is entirely too soon for me to tell you this, but I laid in bed for a very brief time tonight with itchy fingers.  Itchy to type and tell you the “news.”  Itchy to share my newfound hope, my clearheadedness, my thoughts that it feels as if my life has taken some sort of major turn, and it feels distinctly like Rosa in general is a well-loved Tetris game, and the blocks are falling in very satisfying configurations.

Just as the grass is getting greener and the buds on flowering trees are forming, I can almost hear a more positive and happy and WHOLE version of myself unfurling.  I am sure it sounds trite, convenient, unrealistic, impossible, and (let’s not mince words here) frigging annoying as fuck that I am spinning out into what appear to be much calmer waters with the onset of Spring.  It really IS too soon to tell…but I wanted to tell you, that’s what it feels like.

I have had so little joy, and have been buried quite deep really in the pits of despair for such a gawdawful long time, that I really feel the need to celebrate this first day of hope, of feeling satisfied with *things* in general.  The intellectual Rosa knows that this is my mood cycling up (but hopefully not “too” up) in pace with the weather, the time change.  The intellectual Rosa knows that this is almost another year (already???) of DBT under the belt, practicing it every day or as faithfully as the severely downtrodden and willful can.  It’s also another med change, although just a baby adjustment.

I have another idea about happiness in general, and I was oh-so-fortunate to find the following:

I ran across that gem on Facebook, and it spoke to me.  I saved the link at first (as I am apt to do with things that really speak to me but that I don’t want to share because otherwise I would share every other post some days), and then came back to look at it again the next day, and to be frank, I’ve looked at it no less than 30 times in the last week, thinking to myself, could this be?  Is this all “happiness” is? — which begs the question, why have I been letting the rest of the world determine what MY happiness is to ME?

Good question, Rosebud.  Its a good question and its a great question, and the answer for now is that I don’t have to have an answer to that.  What is best and what is good and will make me whole again, I fully believe, is to determine my own happiness.  Yes, that simple.  All of the willfulness in the world has been inside of my fragile psyche the majority of my life, and I (once again, for those who are counting) will be letting that go and putting willingness back in my  heart.

Today was so amazing and wonderful from a standpoint of making myself get things done and do things I have been afraid to do and fend for myself and not make the assumption that I am weak and hopeless and can’t do anything for myself.  So, since today was so great, and that’s what it was like, my new mantra, in addition to the one above, is simple.

I have identified happiness, and I know how to get there.  Or at least I did today.  Maybe someone can give me a nudge if this theory falls all to hell tomorrow or next week or in July.  And feel free to remind me that it was too soon to tell.  It’s really hard not to get excited when the shift is a complete game-changer.