As I've settled in to wrap up the 100 happy days series, I've been looking back at the last 34 days; I noticed a really important trend had occurred, and without planning it, I found myself thinking, saying and texting "I got a piece of myself back." And so it seems a fitting way to end this exercise---ending with a little more me than I started with.
I should explain, of course, what getting a piece of me even means. It's all manner of things, and it happened with all manner of people. First and foremost, it means I went back to my past to resolve something unsettled. A Facebook conversation with a young woman I knew in another life, reconciling a confusing evening and establishing some new connections. A short afternoon with an old friend, someone with whom I always felt a tad shy and awkward. After both casual but important interactions, I felt like all these unsaid or uncertain things were closed. There was nothing more to fret about. There was no more reasons to feel guilty. There was nothing to be shy about. The healing, it appears, was already finished.
Secondly, I took time to reconnect with people I haven't talked to in years. Some of them I have seen, but we didn't have an opportunity to really catch up about life. Karen, SA, cwcaldon, jbrown, Arthur...all different people I deeply care about but lost. They became lost out of circumstance, out of fear, or out of life events. The revitalized relationships secured a sense of self, of belonging, even after so many years of feeling alone.
But this exercise wasn't only 34 days, and so I must look to 66 before it - and when I do, I'm reminded of a sweet little indigo girls lyric "don't forget where you come from, baby, 'cause there's truth in it."
Ah, yes. Truth. This whole experience considering happy things became, for me, about the truth. It became about my truths, my realities that I've ignored for so long, and the beauty in little moments that are my building blocks of joy.
And so, it turns out, I'm not anymore me than I was before, even if it feels that way. The truth is, I've always been here; I just needed to make time to see it, to enjoy it, and to take it back.
I don't do very many things consistently. I struggle with getting into habits because I can't seem to keep myself focused on the task. Maybe it's because I hate convention, especially self imposed convention. Except as I conclude this I series, I realize this was an exception to my consistent inconsistency. Without fail, I found something, I photographed it, and I posted. When I string it altogether, not just in some of it, but in all of it, I find that maybe I could keep doing it because everything I've ever wanted is already in front of me; the parts I thought I was missing were simply waiting for me to find them. That, my friends, is what makes something a proper happy day.
Cheers!
