Hey Crickets, how are things going? Welcome to day number seventy-one of Operation Achieve Anything. Sorry but today’s going to be another downer of a post but the good news is, this time, the sorrow being express actually fulfills yesterday’s assignment that asked me to go a little dark. The funny thing is, though my mood might change while sharing my thoughts, I’m feeling better right now than I’ve felt in a while since I finally have my finance sorted out to the point where I’m no longer worried when I’m going to get my next healthy meal after eating nothing but Dollar Tree food for close to a month.

Yesterday’s depressing assignment was to look within myself in order to find the demons that have been blocking my ability to laugh. The book calls these demons living dragons but as with most of these lessons the book has usurped an already established self-help concept and gave it a brand new name. I already shared what I am about to say over the past three days since the lessons and assignments have all pretty much been the same.

With that, I’ll stop bashing the book and move on to share my tale of the laughter stealing demons. First, I feel like I started out life as a happy but very shy child. I don’t remember any problems until I got a little older and my parents got a divorce. As I said in the past, my family is filled with alcoholic and enablers who all actively lived in denial that anything was ever wrong. Since my parents were so good at hiding their struggles from us kids, my parent split came from out of the blue.

To add to the confusion of the randomness, I was also young enough that everything seemed great one day and the next my dad just disappeared while being told not to worry by the deniers. It took a while for my dad to find an apartment and settle into his new single life before he returned to take my older sister and me for weekend visits so he didn’t disappear forever but however long it took or him to settle in, felt like a lifetime as it was going down.

I’m not one of these people who feels guilty for causing the split but I do feel that it sent me on a depressing path where my tool of denial was dark humor when deep down, I was a very sensitive kid. I used to cry all of the time over the simplest things because facing the world alone felt was really tough for me so I hid my tears by going the opposite route by turning everything into a joke. After a while, this seemed to really work because I could find humor in the darkest subjects that you can think of and truly thought this was fun.

I probably would have turned to humor as a defense mechanism whether or not my parents got divorced by I don’t think I would have gone as dark if it wasn’t for the chaos that followed. My parents split is more significant in understanding why I lost my humor because it was my first experience with losing an entire group of people who were important to me all at once, or at least had the group’s structure shift to where it was unrecognizable.

I don’t know for sure, but this might be why I’ve always felt it was easier to fit in with a small group instead of maintaining tighter relationships with individuals. Maybe I was after that family experience that was taken away by a mother who worked her ass off in order to support us and a dad who I now only saw every other weekend with his new wife and family that he was working hard to support.

Ever since I was a little kid, I found myself falling into small but tight groups of friends. Yeah, I’d always have a best friend in the bunch, but even with them I never felt comfortable in one-on-one situations unless they were quick or there was something else going on as a distraction in order to avoid getting too personal or close. I think it was easier for me to perform to a group instead of let down my guard and live life like the individual that I am. Either way, it never mattered in the past because I always felt that I was having fun as this character of myself.

The only problem with the group approach to friendship is that it’s hard enough to maintain an individual relationship let alone manage a herd of feeling. Though a couple of these groups lasted rather long, my detached sense of self meant that I was one of the first to go whenever a group would split up. This wasn’t that big of a deal in my youth because I usually had a couple of groups that I would bounce back and forth between.

Due to the fact that I inherited my family’s denial abilities, I dealt with the group splits by just jumping ship to focus on the new group while letting the old group live on through memories of the past instead of trying to keep a casual connection. As I got older, these group breakups got harder and harder to deal with and the latest one was the final straw because I had no backup group to turn to and even if I did, I didn’t have the emotional energy for another restart.

Since humor has been such an important part of every relationship that I’ve ever been in, now that they’re all gone, I no longer find it any fun to laugh. I don’t know if I’ll be able to recover from this one because without having humor as a tool I have no idea how to interact with other, but at the same time, I struggle to see myself going back to the carefree me that definitely was more fun.

So, there you have the dragon or demon that’s stolen my ability to laugh. Of course, there is much more to how things came to be but this is what I’ve got in order to fulfill yesterday’s assignment. If any of my friends from the past are reading this, I’m by no means saying that anyone is to blame for my failed approach to long-lasting friendships because I’m aware that I am mostly to blame because the way I deal with my abandonment issues is that I’m either all-in or I’m gone based on how well I feel I fit in.

Now let’s move on to today’s assignment. Thankfully, we’re off the topic of humor and have moved on to focus on not worrying about things that are out of my control. Again, this is great advice but as far as the lesson being taught, this is nothing more than recycled self-help bumper sticker talk. The actual assignment is to just leave other people alone and focus on my own work.

Spoiler alert, as a shut-in who’s never really cared about other’s mistakes because I’m too busy making my own, this assignment is going to be super easy to achieve but you’ll still have to wait until tomorrow’s update to see how I actually fulfill the task. Until then, it’s now that time for me to 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.