Kristy Kelly: Happiness is a struggle
Mental illness has a way of warping even the mundane into something darkly comedic.
I have spent my entire life planning to survive. That’s it, to survive. At first, I survived on instinct, then anger, and finally out of spite. When stress is a comfort zone and anxiety is a security blanket, normalcy becomes subjective. Apparently, I can now turn happiness into abject terror. If I could have chosen a superpower, fear of being happy wouldn’t have been in my top five. No, I would definitely have gone with being invisible, had I been given any choice in the matter.
Like my mother before me, and my daughters after, ignorance and poverty did their best to enable us to make one bad decision after another. It feels like a generational curse—this perpetual loop of survival at all costs, often at the expense of better opportunities.
The weight of waiting is like an anvil on my chest. I can hear the doomsday countdown in the back of my mind. It’s coming. There is nothing like breaking out in hives at my desk because I received a compliment. Even then, I paused to wait for the corrective action I needed to take because surely the compliment wasn’t the only reason to speak to me. I feel like I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don’t even know what I think will happen, but it’s going to. My world will crash and burn, just like it always does.
Emotional isolation has been my preferred defense mechanism. My feelings are mine, and yours are yours. The two don’t ever need to meet. Ever. This self-induced monster of a bad habit is fighting for its own survival against a late contender to the match—happiness. Who will win this epic battle of trauma-based responses versus reality? I’m as anxious as the rest of you to find out.
My fiancé, Derrick, and I live together, but we work opposite shifts. He comes home in time for me to leave for work, and I won’t see him again until the next fly-by morning. As he leaves for work before I come home, we really only see each other about three days a week.
While I had every intention of getting lunch today, I definitely forgot to take one, so I left work a little early to grab a bite to eat. I was excited because it also meant I got to see Derrick. I live three blocks from work, but I promise you, the drive took forever. When I got home... Derrick was not there!
For about ten seconds, I ran through every negative emotion my overactive imagination could cause with a bombardment of worst-case scenarios. Then I called him, and he told me he was on his way home. I stood by the door and waited because somehow that would keep the scenarios I imagined away from him. It wasn’t until I watched him get out of the car that I believed he wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere after fighting with a bear to save an old lady from being mugged. I exhaust myself.
The problem with living day by day, or step by step, is that there is no future planning because it doesn’t exist yet. For so long, I didn’t have the mental capacity to think about tomorrow, and now I don’t know what to do with myself. Depending on other people is the equivalent of kneeling on frozen peas to me. Just because I can survive without leaning on others doesn’t mean I should. I cannot spend the rest of my life waiting for the worst of humanity to reveal itself in every single person I know. Statistically, that’s impossible.
I don’t know how to be happy. I don’t know how to share my love, my friendship, or my emotions. I’ll go toe-to-toe in a confrontation without breaking a sweat, but don’t ask me how I feel.
But here’s the thing: maybe happiness isn’t about knowing what to do or how to do it. Maybe it’s about showing up, even if I’m unsure, and letting myself be a little vulnerable. After all, survival has gotten me this far, but living—that’s the next step. And maybe, just maybe, I don’t have to take it alone.
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