I’ve heard it all my life that happiness is a choice, sort of.  What I couldn’t keep up was the demand that I be happy constantly and any time I was less than happy I was flawed, needed fixing, or needed to snap out of it.  I am happy, sad, funny, weird, crying, excited, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  I remember reading Charles Schultz book, Happiness is a Warm Puppy. https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Puppy-Peanuts%C2%AE-Charles-Schulz/dp/1604335769 I love the book.  I enjoy being happy.  I learned I can be happy with simply things.  I learned I can be happy in many situations but sometimes I’m sad.  Sometimes I felt gray.  I learned I can being flaming angry.  Most of my childhood I worked at squelching all other emotions accept happy and I was, sort of.

I’ve known all my life that happiness is an inside job but I didn’t know that not being happy is not a crime.  In my effort to be only happy, I denied the rich tapestry of emotions available.  If I only had a yellow crayon in my coloring box, I miss out on so much other cool stuff.  Plus I stop appreciating the yellow one.  I love color.  ALL OF THEM.  I love feeling emotions.  ALL OF THEM.  In my quest for being what others expected me to be I slowly stamped myself out until I couldn’t feel any emotion.  Life was gray.  No happy no sad…nothing.  My counselor helped me to reconnect to my emotions.  WOW was that a tough period of time.  The easiest emotion to tap into was anger, so my counselor would work at pissing me off.  He would get frustrated when I would make it disappear.  He was astonished that I wasn’t suppressing my anger I could make it vanish.  Well, sort of.  It didn’t actually vanish I could move it to the part of my mind that I could no longer access.  When he connected me back up with my emotions fire and lava came spewing out of my soul.  Years of stored up rage demanded releasing.  It became dodgy trying to function with this avalanche of emotions smashing into me.  Fire and Ice and everything in between.  I was not happy.  I was everything all at once.  This past month I dipped and swayed as my body adjusted to not having my thyroid medicine.  I realized I wasn’t feeling good but I was still feeling a wide array of emotions.  So I wasn’t depressed, but I wasn’t happy either.  Emotions add a richness and a vitality to life.  Reconnecting to my emotions I am still happy but I know it is ok to be sad, grumpy, agitated, angry, excited, scared, wound up, and all the wonderful feelings available.  I am thankful I had a caring understanding counselor guide me through this tricky business of connecting to my emotions.  At times I would get overwhelmed and he taught me to slow the emotional flood down.  He taught me about boundaries, setting aside emotions to feel later, not to ignore my emotions and be true to myself by allowing myself to feel the emotions I was feeling.  I still like being happy but I am blessed to have all the other emotions there too.