Chosing Happiness = Choosing the Journey

I love it when my favorite TV shows deal with mental health, and one of my favorite shows right now is Mercy. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it focuses on Veronica, a nurse who served in Iraq and is now home dealing with PTSD. In last week’s episode, they talked a lot about choosing to be happy. Her ex, who served with her, said he chooses every day to move on and to be happy. Her response?

“You just choose? Must be nice!”

I had always heard of the concept of “choosing” to be happy, and for a long time I believed it was purely that simple: that making the choice resulted in instant happiness. And my response was the same as Veronica’s. I envied those who could just choose, and knew I’d never be one of those people.

But I was misguided. Choosing happiness is not a choice that instantly makes you happy. I know now that choosing to by happy is a long and winding road, a series of developments and a whole hell of a lot of practice.

Choosing happiness should more accurately be called “choosing the process” or “choosing the journey.” Because when you make the choice, happiness does not just instantly “turn on” in your mind or body. Usually, when you make the choice, it is the beginning of your path to recovery. You’ve decided to be happy, but happiness does not occur just because you choose it. One you choose it, you have to learn the skills and processes to create happiness in your life. This can take weeks, months, even years.

Once you choose recovery (which is, let’s face it,almost analogous to happiness) you have to reprogram yourself and change the habits and behaviors that make you sad. We’ve adapted to our condition and a lifecycle that perpetuates unhappiness. People with BPD and depression and other mental illnesses are addicts – we’re addicted to our self-destructive behaviors and the unhealthy ways we cope like alcohol or self-injury or binging, etc. (and understandably so – they’re the only things that bring small temporary comfort in our world with no other comfort, so why wouldn’t we be addicted to them?) But with a lot of hard work, we can abandon those addictions and find new ones to take their place. We can become “addicted” to using positive coping strategies such as “Distract, Relax, And Cope” (see entry “Emergency Coping Plan”) or Self-Affirmation (See entry “Thoughts from my Little Notebook"). These don’t come naturally to us: we have to learn them.

But once you learn them and practice them, you find they bring small amounts of comfort. They sooth you the way a glass of liquor or a cut arm once soothed you. So little by little, these behaviors take over. Recovery happens and eventfully – though it may take a long time – happiness creeps in. It creeps in because by choosing recovery, you’ve chosen happiness.

For me, the day I chose to finally seek a diagnosis and get treated was the day I chose happiness. There was no happiness in my life that day; I was as far down as a person could be. The happiness came later. But without that first choice, it never would have happened.

And I sit here now, typing on my computer and looking out the window into a world full of beauty, beauty and life that I missed for so long, when I thought choosing happiness was next to impossible.