True: Consistent with fact or reality, Not counterfeit; real or genuine.

"If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?"

I don't know Sheryl. I don't know.

Everyone I know feigns enjoyment from something that truthfully they either hate, or just genuinely aren't interested in. My Dad pretended to love Kate Bush to woo my Mum, I said I was good at RPG gaming to impress a boy and Ned Stark pretended to like the Lannisters, all of which backfired horribly. Dad had to listen to Kate's screechy soprano every Saturday morning, I walked around in circles holding a grenade while being shot at in call of duty and Ned Stark lost his head (spoiler!).
We are a generation of people pleasers and exist purely to impress others. I have always been influenced by what is "cool" or trying to make myself look "successful" without fully grasping what that even means to me. I have lived in the belief that if I am to be worth dating, I have to be a female carbon copy of the person I am interested in, instead of someone with their own hopes/dreams/values etc.

I've been meeting a lot recently with a woman that I look up to as a female mentor and all around amazing person. She is one of those people I feel you don't just meet by chance and exudes bona-fide happiness from within herself. We have been talking a lot about living 'authentically' by identifying values I truely hold dear to me and others that perhaps have purely been impressed upon me.
It's interesting once you start to get to know yourself (albeit via a beautiful Canadian woman) that you realise just how much you hide from the world and how much you've fabricated just to fit in. It also helps you recognise how exhausting and unfulfilling your life is when you are not living authentically and being true to yourself.
      
I've been making lists of the things that make me feel happy such as 'finishing a book' or 'having a bath' as well as core values that are important to me like 'family' and 'honesty'. These are, and should be, different for everyone but if you can incorporate those things into your goals then you can start to live a much more fulfilling life. Ask yourself why you enjoy what you do with your spare time and what you want to do with the rest of the time you have, 'cause if it makes you happy, it can't be that bad.      

Time: the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another.

I bought a diary to start off last year that read "2014, This is your year" and I genuinely believed it would be true. I would read those words inscribed on the inside cover of that hardbound organiser as we grew close to the end of another crappy year and thought to myself YES. Next year will be MY year. 

Two days into 2014 I found myself lying on a hospital gurney being wheeled into surgery to have my appendix removed. Seven months later I was back in having another laproscopic procedure to remove a mandarin sized ovarian cyst. I gave up my new diary a couple of months into the year as I began to realise that this really was not going to be my year. I flicked through the brightly coloured pages and stared back at the happy woodland creatures that jotted the pages and screwed my face up at my illegibly messy handwriting soiling the book with useless 'don't forget's. I felt like a phoney even as I wrote down those important dates and bills to pay in a book fit for a child. I told myself that this was how to do adulthood - writing lists, eating breakfast, making my bed every morning. Perhaps I would even venture into the realm of the 5 plus a day culinary regime. This wasn't the case however and 2014 was fay from being 'my year'. I was in a job that made me miserable, my health was in disarray, my family seemed broken beyond repair and my bed was still unmade. 

I felt the constant pressure of time running away on me and was feeling ever more analogous with the lyrics "So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking" written by Roger Waters for Pink Floyd's song Time. Every day I would wake up with a "what's life going to throw at me today" attitude which, as I have learned, makes you a very angry and unhappy person. I began to see patterns in my unhappiness after I was made redundant from my job and thus decided to make a useful list of things I wanted to focus on to make my life better:

1. Don't stress about things that are out of your control

2. Don't make excuses

3. Listen

4. See beauty in the small things

5. Take your time, don't rush

6. Don't take on others negative energy

7. Smile

8. Breathe

Although seemingly stupid at the time, this list helps me every single day. I now feel sorry for people who speed through their life and honk when they catch up to those who at their limit. I empathize with those who spend their days in anger and resentment instead of looking further, through all the shit, and seeing what really is important. Hollywood glorifies this to no end with the classic cinematic tale of a man who works all his life, focused on money, never taking the time to see what really makes him happy. So why is this such a regular occurrence? Why do people sit so comfortably in misery?

Time. We all know we are running out of time. A yearly diary helps cater to this by consolidating all the things you don't have time to remember on paper whilst simultaneously making you feel like you have achieved something. Add to the mix some pre-existing anxiety and depression and you've really got yourself an i'm-lost-and-don't-know-where-i'm-going-with-my-life party.

It has taken me years to start addressing my problems and recognizing what I need to add or subtract from my life an it all comes back to time. Do I have time to fix this? How much time have I wastefully invested in them? Will I ever get time to do that? Who will be there when my time runs out? There will always be kinks in the chain but you cannot stress about things that are out of your control, it is an enormous waste of your time. Only you can provide the answers to your own questions, don't make excuses as this only hides to the truth. You can't begin to move forward if you are not honest and don't listen to yourself. Take your time to see beauty in the small things. As Sura wrote in her article Why We Rush Through Life, "To be present is to fully inhabit the moment, to slow down and pay attention to everything around us" which you cannot do if you don't take the time to actually be present. Don't let others rush you and don't take on their negative energy, move at your own pace. Do something, read something, see someone that makes you smile. The scientific benefits of smiling outweigh any negative influences and help to begin to calm you and your body down. Last but not least, as my gorgeous yoga instructor Kotte has taught me, Breathe. Breathe in until you can feel every corner of your lungs expand and let go of your daily conflictions as you exhale.  Breathe in in an extended rhythm with your body and your mind will follow. Don't convolute your mind into thinking "this year will be different" because a year is just another way of measuring time. 

Every year can be your year. 

"You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today" - Pink Floyd, Time.

Learn: to acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience.

I can't swim. I wish I could, just like I wish I liked egg yolk or any music by The Smiths but unfortunately I just wasn't born to do everything. I like to think I have a sound understanding of the world around me but when I really look at something to discuss at great length, all I have is my own alluvion of experience. My attention span is so short that in this world, where we are given information in such quick succession, it is much preferable to find myself at the business end of a chocolate bar watching videos of cats rather than educating myself on Florentine architecture during the Renaissance. I can easily stay afloat in an intellectual conversation by adding quick fire facts and anecdotes but do I really even understand my contribution? For the most part, the answer is no (unless discussing a feline's ability to incite laughter on every level of stupidity) and thus uncorks my crippling social anxiety. Just like my inability to swim, my panic towards amicable "chin-wagging" is driven by fear. My fear of inhaling water and flapping aimlessly in a black abyss psychologically propels me into heavy breathing, sweating and snotty tears.

I spend most of my timing holding malicious thoughts at bay and taking medication to prevent grotesque panic attacks. Medicating mental illness is comparable to wearing inflatable arm bands in deep water; it temporarily stops you from sinking but doesn't actually fix the underlying problem which is of course that you are on a swift course to drowning. How I got so far out of my depth I'm not sure, but the medley of pills on my medical carte du jour for the past decade has created a crutch that I now so desperately cling to. I have been pharmaceutically treated by my GP for depression, grade 2 bi-polar, insomnia, acute anxiety and even Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder yet am still bound to my physician and his team of state-funded psychologists in a merry-go-round of emotion and instability.

To break this cycle I have now decided to try and teach myself to be happy physically, mentally and spiritually through a self-medicated dose of exercise, healthy eating, quitting smoking and trying out the Mantra that is Mark Manson's "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck". I do not intend to undermine any prior help given to me but more to offer myself a chance to live life how I want to live it. I also wish to invite others who similarly have been 'condemned' with ailing mental illness to join me on my bare all quest for happiness in hopes that it may aid them on their journey also. (Cat taxes included with weekly post.)