No happiness allowed

Have you ever encountered someone that is against any sort of happiness? What’s with that? Why do people go out of their way to hate on any and everything that people enjoy?  What exactly are they getting out of it?

Prime example: trend haters. If it’s trendy, they hate it… for instance Pokémon Go. I can’t even count how many people were bashing the game, bashing the adults that played the game, bashing enjoyment of the game in general. I saw lots of posts like “while y’all are out chasing Pokémon I’m out chasing this money.” or other dumb stuff along those lines. Why does it matter that we are out enjoying ourselves? At no point does our playing Pokémon Go have any effect on them. Yet, these people go out of their way to make sure the world knows they don’t like what others are enjoying. 

Even more recently, the “fidget toy” trend has been getting a TON of hate. Just go into the comments of any social media page that advertises the cubes, spinners, or anything else fidget related. It’s over run by people that have taken time out of their day to complain about how stupid they think this particular trend is. WHY DOES IT MATTER? Someone buying a toy to play around with has no bearing on the outcome of your day. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. 

Then there are the relationship haters. You’ll know them by all the bitter quotes about loyalty that cover their pages. They don’t believe in love anymore and you shouldn’t either. They always have something negative to say about everyone else’s relationship. However, they are so focused on hating other’s relationships that they have no time for one of their own. You have a guy that texts you “good morning”? He’s only awake because he was out cheating. You have a girl that makes you proud with her dedication to school? She thinks she’s better than you. There is no such thing as a healthy relationship to these people. 

Happiness is something that must be crushed whenever possible. 

I understand that life can make you cynical. I lost my mom, my whole world, when I was 16. It was crushing. It opened my eyes to loss, hurt, and how unfair the world is. It didn’t make me hate happiness though. It made me crave it. I wanted to be happy. It made me embrace every happy moment thereafter. 

Honestly, if you want to be cynical, be cynical. If you want to be miserable, be miserable. However, don’t expect others to sit in the misery pit with you. Let everyone else be happy. 

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Self care

I have to regularly practice self care. Whether this be going walking by the river, solo dates, reading, writing, watching anime, anything that calms me. 

I have suffered from depression since the time of my mothers passing. I am going on 18 years of dealing with her loss. I’m much better now but it still rears its ugly head. When it does, it hits HARD. Depression is not the same as being sad. People will have you believe it is but those people have not experienced what real depression feels like.  The feelings of worthlessness, of emptiness, the lack of interest in life itself. You find yourself at the bottom of a pit, in the dark, alone. For a while, I stayed at the bottom of this pit, an emotional wreck. No one noticed. See, I am really good at pretending to be just fine. In fact I’m an expert at it. Smile, laugh, all while I was contemplating suicide. 

Then I saw a therapist. I tried the meds but I went from feeling like sh*t to not feeling anything at all and I didn’t like that, so I stopped. I started getting myself out of the house. I learned about blogging. I bought several journals. I began to write my feelings out. I learned how to sense when that pit fall was coming and things I can do to avoid it.  I won’t say I have avoided the pit every time but I now know how to build a ladder and get myself out. I have depression, depression no longer has me.

Then came the panicky-ness. I don’t think I can call it a full blown panic attack, maybe anxiety? I have no idea where it came from or why but it’s been popping up lately. My heart rate will suddenly increase, I’ll feel uneasy, like I’m missing something incredibly important, I’ll feel on edge like something is about to go wrong or something terrible is about to happen. The worse part? I have no idea what sets it off. I’ve woken up from my sleep panicking. I have to talk myself down. Part of me feels like the world and the things happening right now are getting to me. I tend to feel deeply. Someone else being hurt, hurts me. Their tears are mine. My emotions run deep, even though I present a stoic facade.

This is why I have to practice self care. I have to take time to do things to make myself comfortable. I have to do things that make me happy. I try and decompress I guess. The world will break you down, this is my way to combat that. I stay away from the news, tune out the politics, ignore as much stupidity as possible. Whatever it takes to take that weight off of my shoulders. I have learned that taking care of myself is not selfish. 

You should practice self care, too. Life is difficult. The ups and downs can damage you. Step away. Do that thing that you’ve been wanting to do. Go that place you’ve wanted to go. Read that book you’ve been thinking of reading. Take care of you. You deserve a moment to drop the weight of the world, even temporarily. You can’t build others up when you’re broken down. You deserve this. You need this. You’ll feel better, I promise. Take care of you. 

Excited

Two weeks. Two weeks until I get to go to MAGfest for the second time. Not only am I going, I am staying in the hotel attached to the convention center. Even better, I am going with an AWESOME group of friends. I am excited. I think what excites me most is the fact that I get to be a nerd with no judgement. It has been a long time coming. I have had to, I guess you could say, “hide” my nerdiness. As a 32 year old black female, I am supposed to like “Love and Hip Hop” or “Real Housewives” and other stereotypical stuff like that. Instead I am waiting on the next Marvel and DC movie. I can’t wait until Pokemon Go comes out. I can sit and watch Twitch streams for hours. I don’t fit the “thirty-something” mold. I am finally around people that accept me for who I am and it is a glorious feeling. So, I can finally be excited. I can be excited about conventions, games, nerdy teeshirts, anime, movies, all the things that I like. It’s a beautiful feeling.

To Facebook or not to Facebook, that is the question…

So people ask me why I deactivated my Facebook account. Honestly, I needed to. For me, it was no longer a way to connect with friends. It had become a timeline full of drama, “challenges”, political sniping, terrible grammatical errors, game requests, and compliment fishing. It had become a stress. Worse, it had become an addiction. It was no longer “just for fun”. I woke up and checked Facebook. I went to the bathroom, I checked Facebook. At a stop light, I checked Facebook. If I had a break at work, I checked Facebook. Doing homework? Let me take a break and check Facebook. In bed for the night? Better check Facebook one more time. Every time I checked it, nothing was different. Same people doing the same things on my timeline, no big changes. So why did I NEED to be connected to it so much? What was I afraid I was going to miss? I asked myself why I couldn’t go without it. That’s when I realized, I *could*… I should… I WOULD! At that moment I took the plunge. I opened the settings and pressed “deactivate”. I then deleted the app off of my phone and my iPad. That was 7/14/2014. I won’t lie and say I didn’t miss it for at least the first two weeks. I won’t say I didn’t think about re-activating my account. However, now, I don’t feel the “itch” to be a part of that world anymore. Will I give Facebook another shot somewhere down the line? Eh, maybe. I will say that if I do go back, I will be doing things quite differently. No need for 500+ friends that I really don’t communicate with. No need for inclusion in every group. No updating every five minutes. That’s not a priority right now, though…