Choosing Happiness
I am no stranger to the fact that life does not go according to plan. It almost never does. But that isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it is better than we could imagine and sometimes it is awful, but most of the time it just IS. When I was 13, I wanted to be a basketball player. I was a decent athlete, I probably could have played college ball, but I’d never have made it into the WNBA even if it had existed back in the day. A motorcycle accident when I was 14 years old put an end to that dream. So after some difficult teen years, I re-negotiated life. I let go of old dreams and made new ones.
Like a lot of people, I spent my 20s and early 30s in a haze/flurry of daily life. I was fortunate to be able to choose to be a stay at home mom because I couldn’t imagine anything more important than raising my babies. Even through the struggles and sacrifices of that life, I loved it so much. I was a military spouse as well, so I had plenty to keep me busy. I truly enjoyed the relationships and feeling of being an active volunteer in a military community. I had aspirations of a career, but I knew that could come when my children were “ready” for me to go to work. I didn’t have any major health issues. In fact, if you had asked me back then, I would have said I was in perfect health. And I would have said I was happy, because I really was.
I spent a couple of years working part time as a kindergarten teacher’s aide while my kids were in school and we were living in Germany. I went back to staying at home while my husband was on his second deployment to Iraq. I just wanted to focus on keeping life stable for my kids and keeping myself physically and mentally fit to be their mother through the incredibly scary year without him.
When my husband left the military and we landed in Utah, I felt a lot of internal pressure to get back to work. We had just signed a mortgage, after all, and life outside the military was a little bit intimidating. I found an entry level job working in school finance that I thought would be a good stepping stone to my former dreams of making big money in accounting. HAHA! Six months in, I found myself missing that kindergarten classroom and I signed up to get a degree in education. For the next two years, I worked full time and took classes at night and online. It was hard, but I was happy in the struggle.
Teaching felt like what I was meant to do all along. It came so naturally to me and I absolutely LOVED teaching kindergarten. The problem is that I had an unhealthy drive to do “whatever it takes” when it came to teaching. It consumed me. You can ask my husband and kids, I was ALWAYS in teacher mode. I worked 60-70 hours a week. I honestly do not know how I did that for as long as I did. But in 2016, that started being a big problem. That is when my RA symptoms really kicked in. Pain, fatigue and brain fog. I thought I was just getting old and lazy. I have already shared a bit of my diagnosis story, so I won’t go into that again. I tried for two years to cut back and take better care of myself, but teaching, and doing it well takes a LOT of time and energy. A lot more than most people know. In fact, I’d say that unless you have a teacher in your circle, you can’t really understand that. The nature of teaching combined with my perfectionism (not a gift, but a definite curse) and my new challenges led me to quit teaching at the end of the 2020 school year. I was devastated. I still am. I tutor several students, but it’s not quite the same and I’ll always miss it.
In a previous post, I explained some hardships (my family and) I have gone through in the past couple of years. It has affected all of us, not just me. It has changed so much about me. I was so driven and full of energy. Now I have to budget my energy and I can’t do many of the physical activities that I loved. The ones I still can do, I can’t do at nearly the same level. But it’s not just physical changes I am alluding to. My mental health has suffered. I have questioned my faith in God. There have been positive changes too. I have learned the value of self care. I find joy in the small things. I (try) to live in the moment and take advantage of the good days. I think I’ve become infinitely more compassionate and empathetic.
In the past year, Bryan (my husband) and I have found ourselves questioning our “plan”. You see, we always wanted to get to our retirement number – not an age, but an amount in our retirement funds – at an early enough age to retire “early” and travel more. But when you watch your parents die without realizing their dream retirement and you find that you have a potentially crippling disease, you start to wonder if the way it has always been done, and the way you planned to do it, is what is best for you. Now, I feel like we are both re-negotiating what we want in this next season of life. Maybe this is a natural response to what we’ve been through, Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis. Either way, we are in a transitional time and we are not sure where it will lead us.
We have decided one thing, though…we are shaking it up. We paid off our house early. That was the first part of the new plan. We are in the process of saving up as much money as we can. Bryan is quitting his job at the end of this summer and we are going to travel the country in a van. It is the most scary, and exciting, and scary thing we’ve ever done. We don’t have a definite time frame for how long we are going to do this and there are some challenges around my health care we’re figuring out. But we are going to make this happen and experience a different life on the road. We want to meet new and interesting people. We want to explore the rich cultures within our beautiful country. We will probably come back to Colorado after, but we’re not entirely sure. That’s the beauty of it. We can do what we want to do. We are open to the possibilities.
If I have learned one thing over the past few years of deteriorating health and losing loved ones, it is this: You can wallow in grief and sadness or you can grab and hang-on to the good, chase it, even. We are ultimately all responsible for our own happiness and happiness doesn’t come along and hit you in the face. It is not chasing you. It is not a destination to reach. It is found along the way, in your journey. You might have to slow down and pay close attention to notice it. You might only notice it in hindsight. But you always have to choose it.
