Good morning Crickets. Welcome to day number twenty-four of Operation Achieve Anything. I love how at this point of the challenge the date matches up with the day count making it super easy to remember where I left off. I also like how this year started on a Monday making the Sundays of the month divisible by seven making four Sundays equal precisely four weeks passage of time. These are the weird thoughts that keep me going these days.

Now that I’ve shared that fun little fact, it’s now time to move on to yesterday’s assignment where I was tasked to stop acting like an Eeyore by experimenting with the power of positive thinking. Once again, I hate to sound like a contrarian because I get the point of the assignment but when taking the lesson literally, it could lead to more harm than good, at least in certain situations.

I mainly take issues with the bumper sticker/motivational meme approach to pushing happiness as an easily achievable sense of being that merely takes happy thoughts to get you through the day. Sure this is excellent advice for those who wake up feeling an odd case of the blues, but to those who suffer from major depression, this over-simplified solution seems to be discrediting a disorder that is more real than anyone who doesn’t suffer from it would believe.

I’ve forced a smile for most of my life and though I’ve managed to trick many people into thinking I was always having a great time, little did they know the moment everyone was gone I would crawl into a ball for my daily cry. I’ve suppressed so much sadness on a daily basis, in order to just get by, that there’ve been times where I’ve wanted to take my own life. So, this fake it until you make it approach to happiness doesn’t really jive with me.

Then again, I do get the point when it comes to run-of-the-mill sadness, which, I’m guessing, is more of the audience that this lesson was geared toward. As far as the assignment goes, I was supposed to list ten things that make me happy and follow that up by doing at least three of the list items.

Here are the ten things that make me happy that I managed to come up with:

1. Writing
2. Listening to podcasts
3. Naps
4. Drawing
5. Painting
6. Watching funny YouTube videos
7. Morning cuddles with the dog.
8. Playing with my little nephew
9. Spending evening time with the family
10. Getting lost in daydreams

Of the things on this list, yesterday, I managed to pull off everything except painting and drawing. I was able to accomplish all of this mainly due to the fact that I now live by a routine where I do all of these (non-writing/non-drawing) things on almost a daily basis now that I’m a committed shut-in. These list items are also pretty much all that I do in a given day aside from my task-based jobs that bring in my pathetic pay.

Other than disorder-based down days, I think that the only thing keeping me from being happy at this point in my life is the fact that I can’t find a way to fully support myself while doing something that I love. I feel trapped in a situation where I could go out and find some crappy job that may increase my spending abilities while bringing back the suicidal tendencies that led me to move back home, or do what I love and live the life of a starving artist who’s probably past his prime.

Even though it’s a much bigger gamble, I’ve chosen the latter in the above scenario since it allows me to achieve my dream instead of wasting my only time on this planet working for scraps in order to help some money horder achieve their goals. At least this way, I have a chance to make it on my own since struggling is in the equation either way.

Finally, there was a third part of yesterday’s assignment, which was to perform two random acts of kindness. Since I’ve been sick over the past couple of days, with very little human interaction, I opted to cheat a tad bit and randomly chimed in with a couple of good reviews for a couple of my favorite podcasts.

With that, I now consider yesterday’s assignment done; now it’s time to introduce the task for today. This should be a fun one because it’s all about setting goals, which, is something that I’m pretty good at. Though my goals might not lead to financial success or any external recognition, it’s rare that I don’t finish what I start once I’m officially committed.

The assignment is to set a new exciting goal in order to occupy my time so that I become too busy to be unhappy. I can get behind this technique towards happiness because the busier I keep myself, the more that I feel fulfilled.

Of course, you’ll have to wait for my deeper delvings into these thoughts, when I check in with tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s that time again where I say, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.  

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.