CREATIVE NON-FICTION | SPIRITUALITY | MENTAL HEALTH
A Journey Well-Travelled
How it took over a half of a century to find Happiness and Contentment
I wish I had immortalized the exact moment Happiness entered my life, but I do remember the situation well — I finally found someone who believed me.
I’ve written about this before here on Medium, so I will just quickly sum it up here. I was in a coma at around the age of six and when I came out of that coma, I had no memory of who I was or who any of my family were.
The experts say that for the first six years of a child’s life, they are being programed and imprinted with their parents’ values and beliefs. Because of the memory loss, I had none of that. I was a clean slate and had to learn everything on my own because my mother didn’t believe me when I told her I had no memory. I’d also attempted to tell my paternal grandmother once and she just shushed me. I tried telling a few therapists, but I never felt completely comfortable with any of them to fully divulge my secret. The moment I met my current therapist, I instantly knew that not only would she believe me, but she would also help me out of my maze of confusion.
She has done just that.
The day she believed me — sometime in late 2019 — was the day I began my road toward Happiness. I still didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I began to feel its amazing power in my life. In early 2020, my sister filled me in on details of my life before the coma. My life was finally beginning to make sense. With the help of my therapist and my sister, I worked on total forgiveness of anyone whom I thought had wronged me or I had wronged. By December of 2020, I declared to my therapist that my goal for 2021 was to learn Contentment, now that I knew what Happiness was.
Since my past no longer troubled me, I began to live in the NOW.
I’ve been a practicing Buddhist since around 2001, but I could never quite grasp how to live in the present moment. It was never the future that I worried about. I wasn’t even sure I had a future due to my overwhelming depression brought on by my past. So yes, I was a cellar-dweller living in the darkness of my troubled past. I feasted on regret, shame, blame and self-hate. And these dark feasts reflected in my writing — the dark and demented prose consumed me.
And then something changed. By mid-March of this year, I realized that since I’d clawed my way out of that dank cellar, I had nothing to write about. And although it troubled me a bit at first, I began to be okay about it. I moved on to the second greatest love of my creative self — Art.
But that wasn’t the only change.
One day in early June, I finally admitted to myself and my therapist that I am content with my life as it is now. Did you hear that? I finally discovered the meaning of Contentment and it only took me half a year to do so! Could I have done it without learning the true meaning of Happiness? I don’t think so.
So what does this contentment look like? I love living in Oklahoma now and cannot imagine myself being anywhere else. I am comfortable with the relationship I now have with my spouse. We have no expectations of one another, except that we do love one another, even if it isn’t a traditional love story. I love my tiny house with my tiny studio. I love the area that I live in with all the diverse neighbors around me. I love myself and every person I come into contact with. And I can finally say that I do indeed live in the present moment with no past or future to worry me.
I have never felt so spiritual, so loved, so happy and so content — and all it took was a little over a half of a century to get here. A Journey well-travelled.
© 2021 Lori Carlson. All Rights Reserved.
I have chosen to use the creative prompt — | Sea of starlight and hues of twilight | — as a jumping board for this piece. For me, starlight and twilight used to mean entirely different things. Stars were filled with past regrets and it was only in twilight that I felt I could come up from my cellar and face the world — in darkness to hide my heinous self. Since finding happiness and contentment, I see only beauty and possibilities in the twilight among the starlight. Hence the photo I chose for this piece. This prompt is from Diana C.’s Creative Corner:
Lori Carlson writes Poetry, Fiction, Articles, Creative Non-Fiction and Personal Essays. Most of her topics are centered around Relationships, Spirituality, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Nature, Loss, Death, and the LGBTQ+ community. Check out her personal Medium blog here.
