June 22nd 2016 -The security blanket

Here I am back at work, sitting in a telehandler on set, bored out of my mind contemplating emotions as a choice. I was still riding the high of the travel bug. Thinking I had conquered depression.

Happiness is a state of mind. You alone, have control over your mind. It’s easy to fall into a comfort zone. A stagnant emotion that never changes, never lets you down. You know it well, there’s no mystery. You curl up in it like a security blanket, it’s soothing, reliable. When you do feel happiness, it removes your security blanket, no matter how happy you are, you can’t help but worry that it’ll go away. Happiness is unreliable, it’s mysterious, you can’t trust it, so you return to your security blanket of depression. It’s scary to let go of that security blanket. To change your state of mind you need a lot of courage. Yet when you’re depressed, you don’t feel strong enough to find courage. As long as you feel like happiness will not last; it will not last. However, happiness is a state of mind. You alone, have control over your mind. I won’t tell you that it’s easy to change your way of thought. Though it is possible, it takes time. It takes courage to remove that security blanket, and embrace the unknown. Happiness will last for as long as you allow it to.

Old habits die hard. There will always be good days and bad days. However, I believe that everything happens for a reason. There is always a lesson to be learned from anything bad that happens. Rather than getting upset and allowing yourself to curl back up into that security blanket. Find the lesson to be learned. Even if it takes a while to find it, it will present itself eventually. At some point, after you have learned from that lesson, you will see all the good that has occurred as a result. At that point you realize that there is good in even the bad things. That every experience in life has the potential to be good. Eventually, you become comfortable in happiness. It becomes your new security blanket, and you embrace it, you love it. You no longer want the old one, you begin to see it for what it is. In that moment you realize that you can choose which blanket to curl up in. Suddenly you understand that happiness is a state of mind, and you alone have control over your mind. Anything is possible.

Now I do stand by what I said here, I have found this to be true in a lot of ways. Maybe everything doesn’t happen for a reason, but everything that happens is an opportunity for growth. Now I wish I could say that I never returned to my security blanket of depression. However, that is not true. I did not magically become a master of my thoughts. However, I did learn to embrace happiness. I don’t curl up in the depression blanket for too long, and my happiness blanket feels pretty fucking amazing, so I curl up in it far more often than my Depression blanket. I’m just human, and I realize now that sometimes I curl up in that depression blanket because I need to process some deep emotions, but I move through them, and I always return to happiness.