Really Real Life Post

Or maybe Really Real Mental Health Post

This is kinda both.

In my facebook memories today I saw a meme that ended with “I hope the universe rewards you with happiness.”

And I thought, the universe has rewarded me with my happiness.

Not that I wasn’t happy before.  That was one thing Parker and I managed to find.  In the middle of drama and trauma and survival, we would find our happy and our joy and our love.

But right now I have a calm and chaos free kind of happy.

I still have bipolar, and anxiety,and PTSD, and “oh look a squirrel” that like to complicate things and make my world seem like it’s on fire from time to time.  I still have miserably depressed days that make it really hard to keep moving forward.  I still occasionally struggle with anxiety and my brain telling me this is all going to end, but that happens less often now.

I trust that I have stability.  I trust that I have housing permanence.  I’m not always waiting for the next crisis.  I trust that the floor is going to be there when I step out of bed each morning and that it’s not suddenly going to drop out from under me.

My weekly therapy sessions have gotten boring for the most part, and my therapist says that’s a good thing.  Of course that just means we can work a little more on the other stuff that we couldn’t get to because we were constantly putting out fires.

I’m saying all of this just to say that I’m happy.  I’m deep down, gut level, happy.  I’m not “finding the joy in the middle of the chaos” kind of happy, I’m just happy.  I’m able to ride the roller coaster of normal emotions, plus my mental health stuff, and come out with an okay outlook on things.

I’m still fighting depression right now.  But I’m realizing the two can happen at the same time.  Happy and depressed seems counter-intuitive but it’s not, really.  I’m happy with where my life is, I’m happy with the people in my life, I’m happy with where my life is headed and that I’m developing goals.  I’m happy with the stability.

I’m happy that I’m happy.  Which is a really big deal.  I didn’t know how to exist in a state of happiness before.

I’m happy.

And it feels really really good.