Passages

There was once a girl, the second of three children, who found herself growing up in a middle-class American family. Mom and Dad both worked to provide the opportunities they wanted to give their children and the parents did their best to nurture their three kids.

The second daughter was plagued with a variety of challenges that affected her judgment and behavior. By the time she was an adolescent girl, telling lies and acting out in a harsh, belligerent manner toward her parents started becoming more and more common. Her self esteem suffered due to chronic body weight issues that undoubtedly aggravated her behavioral difficulties. Her parents, not knowing how to respond in a caring, supportive way that demonstrated to their daughter the consequences for actions deviating from acceptable social norms, struggled not only with her, but with each other. It was a time of family crisis.

After high school, the daughter tried leaving home to attend school, but that path didn't suit her and she returned. Old behaviors resurrected. She tried finding employment, but a career choice seemed elusive and jobs were random. Lying was preferable to truth telling. Blaming was preferable to taking responsibility. Hostility was preferable to peaceful coexistence. Still, her parents tried to support their daughter in finding a pursuit where she might derive happiness.

After she turned 21 and renewed her attempt to make her way independently, her personal difficulties increased. Her debt escalated and attempts to hide the debt from plain view made the situation far worse. Her actions were criminal in nature. If she found herself unable to pay a bill, she invented an excuse, told another lie, slandered another’s reputation in the process.

Finally at the breaking point, her parents excused themselves from her life. Without wavering, they both asked her to leave their home permanently, attend to the problems looming in her life, and not return until she was capable of making amends. They were worried, almost sick. Months passed of no communication. The daughter felt betrayed and angry that her parents had turned their backs on her.

Then one day she drove over to her parent’s house and found them at home along with both her siblings. Tearfully, she took a step, and admitting she was ashamed of her cycle of bad behavior, asked for forgiveness. She wanted a chance to repair what she had damaged by demonstrating that she was trying to change the person that she was.

But there was more. She was also expecting a baby. And it was complicated. There was no upside to be found in the situation, save for the fact that she felt blessed and joyful at the prospect of being a mother.

She is going to make her own choices, guided by advice from her obstetrician, counselor, friends and family. Everyone has a particular point of view. But in the end, the only view that matters is hers.

I do not know what will happen. I hope for the best. I pray that she may find steadfast strength and the comprehension to acknowledge her life in the present tense and make choices based on where she stands in that life, humbly taking responsibility for herself and her yet unborn baby.

ENJF

I have to admit that I don’t know what these initials mean exactly, but I do know it has something to do with a personality profile, in the Myers-Briggs vernacular. It’s a label, and humans love to label things, people and places. I attended a presentation today and the speaker touched on the topic of introverts and extraverts. Many people in the room gave an audible acknowledgement that they were intricately aware of this distinction and strongly identified with one of the two personality types.

I was sitting at the front of the room closest to the speaker and had been paying close attention throughout the presentation. She was making eye contact with many people in the room but had not made eye contact with me until this precise moment. She looked at me directly and said: you are the introvert, right?

Uh, well apparently so.

The extroverts in the room voiced their agreement with this hypothesis.

The speaker resumed her presentation, acknowledging that extroverts are often guilty of interrupting others when they are speaking, but don’t much seem to mind when they themselves are interrupted.

I try not to interrupt others. I try to listen and respond as appropriate. Sometimes I find myself waiting, waiting, waiting for a break in the conversation so that I may broach a new subject, ask a question or introduce an idea. I would consider it rude to interrupt a conversation in progress to serve my own needs. But sometimes conversations have their own momentum and the lulls I seek just don’t present themselves. The extrovert speakers keep talking and other extroverts keep interrupting in a swirling cycle.

I was talking with my brother yesterday. He is an extrovert and I hold him in high esteem. But when we talk on the phone it is a difficult experience for me. Yesterday I had wanted to ask him something in particular. But as I was listening to my brother talk, the story he was telling, as is typical, kept getting longer by the minute. Eventually, he had to interrupt himself in order to cut our conversation short and answer a call from a client.

I never got a chance to interrupt him and ask my question.

I know that I am an introvert. I work well in a quiet atmosphere and don’t need to interact with others to keep my creative energy engaged. I prefer to minimize my time in meetings unless they are well structured. I have fun in social situations, but I am never the life of the party. I prefer to take a supporting role.

But this word, introvert, this label, seems to convey other information. As though we introverts seek to limit our interaction with others or hide from the world. Today’s presenter did not use these precise words, but she did paint a picture of introverts in similar broad-brush terms.

And I begin to think that being an introvert, governed by this part of my DNA, inhibits me from living a richer, happier life.

On the other hand, I would not wish to be one of those people who chronically interrupt others when they are speaking or verbally arm-wrestles others for the microphone.

So excuse me while I send my brother an email to ask him my question. It is not the quickest way to get a reply, but at least I can use this strategy to communicate a complete sentence.

On a mission

One of the few times I watched Jon & Kate + 8, a topic on that broadcast, discussed somewhat incidentally, was the fact that this family had created a mission statement.

[Note to self: please refrain from indulging in judgmental thoughts about the probable level of family collaboration involved in creating the aforementioned mission statement.]

I was impressed during the broadcast at the concept of actually taking the trouble to formulate and verbalize a family mission statement and I decided to do a little research with my best friend, google. What I learned was not surprising. A number of family therapists cited in the search results recommend that couples (my research was limited to couples since I’m not a mom) not only participate in the exercise of creating a mission statement, but also define the values that guide your lives, both as individuals and as a couple.

I love methodology and in one of my previous volunteer assignments, led a few organizations through strategy building workshops similar to this. The participants begin with some trepidation, but quickly gain confidence and make rapid progress. It always sounds more difficult than it really is.

Anyway, Cristy and I took the time last year to explore our values in life areas such as faith, social pursuits, daily home-life, financial management, holiday and family celebrations, professional-career pursuits, etc. I think we defined 10 or 12 general categories. The values we verbalized were those beliefs we held about who we were as individuals in the distinct life areas and how we each felt we needed to participate as a couple in order to feel whole, validated and cherished.

Not all of our opinions were aligned, but we tried to negotiate through some ideas about behavior that would meet some important needs for us both.

It was useful. Performing that exercise together made us feel as though we had established a broad set of basic agreements for the way that we would interact in these areas of our lives. Because we had made agreements, a large degree of ambiguity about who we were as a couple evaporated. It was as if we had completed a private rehearsal of sorts. While I cannot predict the future, I feel my chances of being blindsided by something unexpected that conflicts with one of my core living values, is greatly diminished.

Nothing is guaranteed. Disasters can happen, garbage disposals can erupt, as ours did this week. We only hope that the practice of finding common ground around the values that are the most important guiding principles of our lives will help us combine our strengths in times of stress, sorrow or sickness. The practice of negotiating behaviors in advance will help us feel empowered to ask for the supportive behavior that we need from the other to offer that extra support when we’re not quite feeling whole. The practice of exploring and envisioning will open our minds to the possibilities that exist for enriching our own lives as well as the lives of others with whom we interact.

All things considered, I’d have to say that Jon & Kate, or at least the producers of Jon & Kate, set a very good example for which I am truly grateful.

RTT - the early edition

Robins arrived in Houston today. I look forward to them each year and they arrive reliably on schedule, about 4 weeks before the official start of spring. They will be here for a couple of weeks before heading a bit further north to chase the edge of the ground temperature change. Of course, I’m just making this up because I am not an ornithologist. But it could be correct.

*************

I stumbled onto a new blog yesterday and the author listed ten things that she learned last weekend. If you think about it, we learn things all the time. So I stopped for a moment or two to consider what I learned last weekend. I did not undertake any particularly studious endeavors, so the things I learned were rather ordinary. But useful, nonetheless. At the top of the list is that fact that when you bake with whole wheat flour, the baked product tastes different. Previously, I had believed that you could bake with whole wheat flour but wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I was wrong. The banana bread coffee cake I made with whole wheat flour is still good, but in a healthy-good sort of way. Not a yummy delicious treat sort of way.

Unfortunately, I purchased a standard size bag of whole wheat flour, so there is plenty remaining for future baking projects. And since I am frugal-girl, completely unlikely to discard a perfectly good bag of flour, there are plenty of whole-wheat baked items in my immediate future.

Chick flick

I’m a chick flick sort of girl. I like movies where the central themes are about building human relationships and making peace with yourself. If the characters are somewhat fashion minded with great shoes and accessories, that’s a big plus. I like intelligent dialog, sweet sentimentality and a good, old-fashioned Hollywood happy ending (sniffle, sniffle).

After all, with the price of movies these days ($19 for two tickets before 5pm thank you very much and $5 for a small popcorn) I don’t need to add an artificial layer of stress to my current existence. I don’t want anxiety, loud bangs, aggressive personalities or dark suspense. I’d be emotionally wiped out by the time the movie is over.

So, dear filmmakers, I realize I might be among a rapidly declining demographic, but please keep making chick movies. Thank you.

Battle with love

When I was a little girl, 6 years old, I thought I was fat. One of my school classmates said it out loud, so I thought it was true. I was ashamed. It never occurred to me that she was wrong. When I look back at school class pictures now, I looked the same as all the other children, but the damage was done. Something changed at that precise moment with the way I felt about myself.

In my teen and young adult years, I wanted badly to have a boyfriend, but I never really did. I did not understand the intricacy of getting to know someone and letting them get to know you. I thought the love dance was merely superficial: labeling the status of a relationship, going out to parties as a couple, acting like you were in love. But I didn’t understand what it felt like to be loved or to extend love. And I strongly suspect this was a result, in part, of the many years of self-loathing that began in the first grade.

This blog is a diary and the thoughts and feelings are my own. It has never been anyone else’s responsibility to make me feel one way or another. There is no blaming or no credit to be assigned out. For most of my life, until recently, there has been a barrier between me and love. I hated love and I grieved over love. It was a battle.

I was able to verbalize it to a therapist a few years ago. Shortly after my marriage ended and I discovered that my life was, in fact going to continue, I realized in order to live it effectively, I’d probably need to solicit some help. Enter the therapist. She asked what I wanted from a love relationship. To my surprise, I was able to answer succinctly: I want to participate in a love relationship where I feel cherished.

That was my first victory in this lifelong battle with love: naming both the obstacle and the desired set of circumstances. My therapist said that was a realistic expectation. Seemed so to me too.

However, in my experience, feeling cherished was not high on that list of feelings with which I identified. More commonly, they would include things like compromised, diminished, marginalized, disappointed. Again, understanding completely that I am solely responsible for my feelings, it is all about my choices and they way I elected to participate in relationships. Relationships with my parents, with myself, with love interests.

Then Cupid flew by my house one night and sprinkled love dust in the air. I awoke the next morning knowing my heart would reopen. And it did. And then it broke again because I fell into an old pattern of behavior. But I saw it and understood. Finally. It was my second victory in my battle with love. That most painful awareness where I stopped applying scotch tape to the gaping wound in my chest. I looked at that wound, ugly as it was, and then tended to it.

Cupid came along again, as he does, and sprinkled more love dust in my direction. I am so fortunate that Cupid led me to my valentine, the love of my life, this place where I feel cherished. It is true, what they say. I had to assign value to myself in order to feel cherished by the person who loves me. And she does. And I can feel it. And it is the sweetest thing I can imagine.

I love you.

Living from scratch

I read a very inspired essay by Anne at life in pencil the other day all about the concept of living from scratch. In other words, starting anew, paving a new path in any part of our lives. And oddly, my father’s voice appears in my head when reflecting on this idea: the words inertia and trajectory. He was a scientist and his work dealt largely with mechanical physics. But these two familiar subjects of physics apply to our lives, perhaps in more ways than we care to admit.

Inertia tells us that an object will continue to move along its current path unless acted upon by an external force. A human-life example of inertia is the person who remains in an unloving relationship without taking proactive steps to make a change for the better. Or a person who has an unfulfilling job but makes no attempt to change the situation. A couple of less obvious examples might be the person who does make an attempt at change, but upon meeting the first obstacle, decides that change is impossible and accepts inertia as inevitable, or the person who selects a change strategy that turns out to be an unsuccessful approach at achieving the desired change, but continues to make the same unsuccessful attempt time after time.

How many of us have fallen under the spell of inertia?

The term trajectory refers to the direction of the new path of an object once a force has been applied to initiate movement. In mechanical physics, we have to compensate for the effect of gravity in order for our object to reach its targeted destination. In life, we have to compensate for other unquantifiable factors, if we hope to succeed in our quest to make progress along a new path. These factors are things like the seductive comforts of our old habits and the voices of fear and shame that play inside our heads.

Creating change in our lives requires some amount of fortitude, perseverance and vision. We need to be able to visualize that the difference we are seeking will prove beneficial and hopefully, increase our level of happiness.

How many of us have stumbled along a new path because we were ill prepared to expend the energy needed to compensate for the unforeseen roadblocks to our visualized success?

I am personally able to check both of these boxes. Time and again I can recall complaining about some circumstance in my life that caused me dissatisfaction, but I made excuses to myself to justify living with the inertia. Or opened the door to a new relationship without acknowledging the need to clean up my behavioral mistakes from the past.

Change is work. It is not as simple as deciding. In physics, there is a formula for computing work, a function of force and distance. In my own life, change has been successful through humility, gratitude, imagination, forgiveness and perseverance over a span of time. The force applied, in this case is not physical at all. A difficult lesson to grasp.

I don’t know if my dad ever thought about physics in these terms, but I am finding comfort in deriving abstract life lessons from the concrete principles he applied in his life’s work.

My personal struggle to cancel out white noise

One of the [many] good things about having a partner in life is that they see you for who you are and sometimes verbally share their observations with you. Much to my surprise and utter dismay, the way that I act is not always the way that I think I act. What a revelation.

Cristy has mentioned to me on more than one occasion that I have an annoying tendency to verbally disagree with certain nice things that she says about me, particularly regarding my appearance. I know that I am not trying to be disagreeable; I am simply repeating aloud the noise that is in my head. But that noise is so loud and those messages are in such sharp contrast to what she says that instead of thinking for myself and selecting the most appropriate response, I allow the chatter to hijack my own voice.

Hmmm, another revelation. Slightly alarming, this one.

The first unfortunate effect is that my disagreement sends a message to Cristy that I do not value what she says to me, and that is untrue. Nonetheless, that is what I am doing.

The second effect is that the noise in my head acts like white noise, canceling out all the other incoming sounds, such as the good loving messages she verbally sends. Those chattering negative thoughts intercept the message before my brain gets a chance to register and deposit the confirming, loving thought in my consciousness.

So here is the question that I pose to myself: how much of my reality do I cancel out without permitting it to even register in my consciousness because of my negative thoughts?

I look to my own family history for an example. An observation.

My mom has said for many, many years that she cannot remember her own father ever telling her that he loved her. This weighs heavily on her very being. Since I was not around during those days, I simply accept what she says as fact; I am unable to dispute it with my own observations. One day, however, she said that my own father did not ever tell her that he loved her. And this one I was able to strongly refute. I lived in that house and remember very well that he told her aloud, every single day that he loved her. I remember the sweet names that he called her and the loving, affectionate things that he said constantly.

I suspect that my mom had so much negative chatter in her head at the time that she could not hear these wonderful things. I imagine that the same might be true regarding her experience with her father.

Everyone talks about living in the present. Appreciating the here and now. I strive to do it but am clearly setting up an internal roadblock to achieving that sought after objective. In this regard, I am my own worst enemy, indeed, my only enemy. I hold the key to serenity but am hiding it away, beneath layers of old dusty noise. The incessant chatter.

I have a colleague who shared with me a technique he employed once to try to clear out the irritating negative self-talk in his head. The noise reverberated while he was running in solitude. He decided that every time a negative thought emerged, he would laugh out loud. His logic being that the act of laughing would both interrupt the thought process and diminish its significance in his consciousness. He said that during his 3 mile run he was laughing aloud almost the whole way, but felt so much better at the end (aside from the fact that the other runners around him kept glancing nervously over their shoulders…).

In my quest to shed personal defects and replace them with behaviors that will permit me to live in the real present, not an artificial version that I create, I will need to adopt a method to minimize these pesky voices, verbally acknowledge the good incoming messages and respond in kind. Perhaps in time, acting in a new way will quiet the noise and allow me to see, feel and live in the true present.

Curtains

There is some drama unfolding among family members and the ripples affect everyone. At the center is a relationship that has expired. Everyone has a bit of experience with this particular episode in the chronicle of living. And the nature of everyone else’s personal experience seems to taint the way that we view and react to what is happening now. There are equal amounts of fear, concern, anger and outrage. These feelings then trigger our tendencies to withdraw, take an offensive stance and/or place blame. I can see parts of myself all over that map.

About 7 or 8 months after my divorce I found myself out of town on business for a few days. In the evenings, I returned to my hotel room, and did some work addressing the things that I had never quite gotten around to processing about my own failed marriage. From that distance, I saw it as though all the players were outside myself. I saw the damaging behaviors, many of which were of my own creation. I even understood why I adopted that behavior. I saw the harmful effects over time and how it contributed to the erosion that finally took the life away from the relationship.

It was painful to put myself there and live it again as an objective witness. I spent most of my evenings in tears, accepting responsibility for so many mistakes, but I completed the work and gained some much needed perspective.

In the present tense, this ugly set of circumstances bears striking resemblance to my own experience. But I find myself unwilling to attribute blame to one party or the other, because the way I remember it, this ugliness, played out in the final act, was set in motion long ago through many other relationship missteps. I suspect in the current drama it is also true. But I can not know for certain, because I have not lived these lives. No one knows. Except for the two people living the experience now.

The rest of us experience it as a replay of the shadows of our memories.

More love

Another story about love, just can't resist. Still feeling all sentimental after the last love story (sniff sniff). This one is also a true tale, with pretend names.

Barbara was 52 and her husband had died. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. They were supposed to live their golden years together. Spoil their grandson, enjoy trips to Florida in their retirement, putter around the house and garden, hold hands, kiss. But cancer had changed all that. His death left her without an identity, floating, anxious, fearful. Every day brought sadness and every night brought tears of loneliness and anger.

She had to reconstruct her life, so to begin, she remodeled her house. It was an excellent metaphor for the more important task at hand, and the decision making that accompanied each building project served as practice for the decisions she needed to make in her own life journey. She started a new profession and gained competency. She started liking herself. She started noticing other people, other men, and they noticed her too.

A longtime neighbor suggested introducing Barbara to a friend that the neighbor had known since high school, Bob. Bob was divorced, stable, a hard worker and had been a good friend for many many years, however, he lived out of state. Barbara didn’t know, but the neighbor persisted. Gentle reminders every now and then. One particular day, Bob happened to be in town on business and had made arrangements to meet his high school chum for dinner. She invited Barbara. She insisted. Barbara agreed but was fraught with anxiety. It felt like a blind date, transporting her back to the last time she actually had a date, in her teens. An awkward age with little knowledge of the world and less knowledge of her own desires or needs in a relationship.

Dinner went smoothly. Bob entered into conversation easily without monopolizing it. His manners, a product of a proper southern upbringing, made her feel secure and special, cherished, even. He called the following day to thank her for her company and sent flowers. She was touched and overcome by this prelude to what appeared to be old fashioned courtship and had a case of nerves as big as Texas. She called to thank him for the flowers; he said he would call her in a couple of days. And he did; they made plans to see each other the following weekend. He stayed in a nearby hotel and orchestrated a comfortable agenda for their weekend entertainment, she only needed to change her clothes, spray on some perfume and grab her purse.

Falling in love was easy, but did not come without the stings of uncertainty or fear. Their romance continued for several years; they found a happy stability and both were sure that this happiness was something they wanted to nurture in their hearts, in their daily lives. So Barbara sold her house and moved to another state to be with him. She left the house in which she had lived for thirty years, her family, her neighbors and friends. She moved to a place where she knew no one, had no family and had to begin cultivating friends again like she was the new kid in school. It was stressful, but she persevered, then blossomed.

Bob and Barbara married. They take care of each other, laugh and fuss. But mostly they celebrate their days together. They value each other and they cherish the sparkling moments of happiness littered throughout each loving day of their lives.

Still life

I have always been partial to still life paintings; scenes from a slice of time in life. A festive buffet table in the midst of a cheerful dinner party, a lonesome bowl of flowers in a dusty, visitor-forsaken parlor, a picnic basket heavy with refreshments waiting on a sunny front porch just before a ride to the country.

It is a mystery to me how these images capture the moment, the essence of human emotion when no human images are present.

I ponder the holiday weekend that just ended and the range of emotions that typically accompany any holiday. This one was no exception. A pinch of stress, heaping helping of happiness, dash of disappointment, cupful of peace. As I get older, I expect stress and disappointment to knock on the door of my holiday; they are annual visitors. I acknowledge their presence and am learning to simply accept that they are there, but not engage with them to a great extent. I have a much better time if I visit with happiness and peace.

On Thursday evening, I viewed the carnage that was formerly my clean kitchen and did my best to tidy up without detaching from the celebration. Dishes, stemware, leftover food loaded into plastic containers, saucepans and kettles in the sink. Contrasted with twinkling tree lights, glowing embers in the fireplace, colorful bowl of apples, bottle of wine on the sideboard. But on Friday morning, with only a small amount of effort, the mess was a distant memory and my kitchen had reemerged from the rubble. Coffee cup, breakfast plate, laptop computer, eyeglasses.

The still lives of the moments of the weekend. The peaceful ending: folded laundry, rumpled blankets, sleeping dogs, cell phones plugged into the wall.

Blue

You know some days are just not as great as other days. For the most part I keep a positive outlook, count my blessings and try to complain less. I’m not always successful and am the first to admit that I have plenty of shortcomings. But today is just not a really good day. Yesterday wasn’t either, come to think of it.

Could be the full moon, biorhythms, fatigue, who knows. To make matters worse, I start punishing myself inside my head by replaying unpleasant circumstances from long ago, feeling the shame and humiliation all over again. Let it go, already! What’s up with that?

I feel unbalanced and out of touch with myself, with all other humans on the planet. I’m not about to publish a manifesto describing a new conspiracy theory just yet; no immediate need to call the mental health patrol Just slightly out of step, that’s all. As if my existence is somehow diminished, maybe even inconsequential.

Seems I’ve felt this way before, yes, it does sound familiar now that I’m reading it back to myself. But I’m taking the regular dose of prescribed meds…could be pms…could just be Wednesday.

Closing a chapter

Tomorrow I will sell my house. I am going to visit the house this evening after work for the last time to pick up the final trickle of random items: a box, 2 sculptures, a platter, a pincushion and some wrapping paper. But while I am there, I will sit on the porch swing for a while and think about leaving this house, in the larger sense.

For the past 16 years, that house has been one of the constants in my world. I have grown into the person I am at this moment by living through the experiences that unfolded there. I will humbly acknowledge and honor the experiences. And I will close the chapter.

I will also take a moment to leave behind a fragment of positive energy for those that will come after me. In my mind, it will sound something like this:

Welcome to your home. I wish I could tell you how many people have lived here before, but I cannot; this house has been standing for almost 90 years. What I can tell you is how much I have loved living in this cozy bungalow. These walls are heavy with sweet memories of delicious meals, lazy summer evenings, heart-to-heart talks, and playful surprises. I experienced some personal trials in this house and shed more than a few tears, but the cheerful windows always drew my attention away from my sorrows to remind me that the world was waiting for me to join in again.

I like to think that this house, your home, has a special blend of energy to share with those of us who have spent part of our lives here. Through our human experiences, we contribute to this magical energy bank and perhaps receive some of the magic ourselves from time to time.

I hope that your days and nights will be enriched with laughter and love and the spirit of this house will echo the joyful music of your lives.

Happiness and shame

I follow Gretchen Rubin’s blog, The Happiness Project, and last week I read something about another blog, Work Happy Now. Both authors suggest thought processes and behaviors to promote a positive frame of mind and reduce the time we spend indulging in complaining and negative inner-chatter as a means of increasing our state of overall happiness. The methodologies seem to have plenty of merit and I have no doubt that if I spent a fraction of the amount of time thoughtfully addressing the way that I process my thoughts as I do watching television, I could certainly increase my baseline level of happiness.

Cristy and I were discussing happiness last week. We know a number of individuals that are going through a difficult period and others that always seem to be going through a difficult period. There are few to whom we would freely acknowledge the complete extent of our happiness. With others, the admission of personal happiness is modestly tempered with gratitude, and if mentioned at all to anyone else, we would tend to indicate our happiness only in passing then quickly change the subject to something benign.

The truth is that for some, there is shame attached to owning happiness. It seems to be such a rare commodity, as though there is not enough available to alleviate the stress, dissatisfaction and frustration prevalent in the lives of so many. We feel shame because we know what it is like to live with a diminished sense of happiness, so now, by contrast, living in a reality steeped in happiness seems indulgent. Our shame whispers to us in the darkened recessed corners of our consciousness that we don’t really deserve it at all; it will undoubtedly dissipate.

And unfortunately, the powers of negative thinking are as strong as the powers of positive thinking. If I permit the idea that my happiness will dissipate to develop into a belief, then I will begin to act as though it were true. My state of mind will have transformed my reality.

Thankfully, my level of happiness is far stronger than my shame at being happy.