Exiting the Plan of Happiness

"The Plan of Happiness" (an original poem of sorts)

It's sad that it's confusing for me to feel happy.

The very first time I pushed through my own limiting beliefs keeping me in the prison of never having experienced joy. Feeling happy.

For the first time in my life I felt zero self consciousness. It's so sad that my first reaction to that moment after that feeling though, was devastation. For my sad, lonely, confused inner child, and for myself in that moment for being 29 years old when I literally first felt happy.

It was so confusing to me that I had literally made every choice I had ever made for the hope of THIS feeling, this amazing, orgasmic, LIFE-gasmic moment where I would suddenly feel everything I had always been missing. I always knew something wasn't there but I just never fathomed that this would be what that something was: feeling happy.

It took me hours of sobbing and simultaneous rollercoasters of emotion, to try to reconcile my entire past with the present moment, what I was feeling, and the sudden opening of a door to an entire WORLD filled with new possibilities for the future, because i finally felt happy.

He held me while I cried for hours, and my mind was overflowing with sudden realizations that I now had the capacity to actually understand correctly. I had done so many things in the name of this emotion, but suddenly everything I had done made so much sense! The flooding of realization made me so happy!

I didnt feel self concious about feeling these emotions. I let myself drench his t-shirt with my salty tears, and I finally let myself express them without a filter. I was so fucking happy.

But I couldn't help but think it must have been confusing for him...my sudden realization that made me finally able to understand that I had been cutting myself for years to just heighten my misery and pain so that I could put a wet washcloth on new scars and feel the flooding of RELIEF. I thought for so long that "relief" was "feeling happy."

I fought so hard to trudge through the utter terror of what everyday life felt like. I felt "okay" occasionally...and sometimes "content." But I realize now those were just times that I was "less burdoned" just for that moment. But that wasn't me feeling happy.

It was so hard and confusing when I realized that everything I had been taught to believe in, these principles that if I lived my life by, I would be saved. I could rest easy. I should have "felt happy."

But all I felt was scared. Scared and confused and hurt, because the "Father in Heaven" I was taught to believe in so HARD without doubt, who supposedly loved me so much he sent his "only son" to die for me...but i was just one of his daughters. I thought that He "wept when I wept," and for some reason that comforted me. But that NEVER made me feel HAPPY.

An entire life lived in fear and wasted to depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder. To a religion that never gave anything back to me...nothing real or lasting or anything to save me from the life I was drowning in. To a mother that always expected the best from me and also the worst. Nothing I could do would ever be good enough for her, and since "this life is for enduring to the end and passing this test," I was set up to never be happy.

So many things fell into place and made so much more sense in that defining moment of my life, a moment that will be seared into my mind forever---the moment I first felt happy.

I realized, "there are a lot of people who do not know that some people have literally NEVER experienced that emotion before!" If someone just could have told me that THIS is what i was fighting for, this literal brand new emotion that i had NEVER EXPERIENCED to even know that i had never experienced. I literally had NEVER been happy!

I felt so much value in having that perspective! I felt special! And for the first time ever I didnt feel SELFISH for feeling special! That made me so happy!

But I think about it now and it makes me sad, because i know now that the one thing my family had always prayed and hoped and fasted for, that I would just "get better," that I would stop feeling so hopeless and wanting to kill myself; none of their prayers or efforts to "help" in their way ever made me feel happy

Their prayers did not cause me finally feeling happy.

I felt strong that I had EARNED this feeling. Through the mental anguish it took to separate myself from the things that I knew would bring me "tolerance" from my family, I LEARNED hard lessons. I went to DBT and started working out my issues in therapy. I made myself stay alive out of sheer will power even when I thought i had no will to live. And I finally broke through my glass ceiling of anxiety and fear to LET MYSELF feel happy!!!!!!

It's confusing that, for the only reason being that my parents are taught not to believe I even could feel happiness outside of their religion and dogma, I have to feel guilty about finally feeling happy.

But im still climbing. The more I have the freedom to finally embrace who I truly am inside, the more I am not trying to fit ANYONE'S expectations or "mold" of what they think I should be, the more power I feel in reclaiming my own voice. I can speak for MYSELF now, and that makes me incredibly happy. 

I have finally unbrainwashed myself through a lot of hard work and facing hard cognitive dissonance, through sitting with those feelings and letting myself FEEL for MYSELF. Without having to tell anyone to validate it for me: that makes me SO HAPPY! 

I am an exmormon, I exited the "Plan of Happiness," and I am finally happy.