"Most People Would Rather Be Certain They're Miserable, Than Risk Be Happy"........Robert Anthony

I wanted a happy quote tonight and I have been keeping this one for quite a while now for a special occasion.  I think most of us have gone through periods in our lives when we beome comfortable with our misery.  It almost becomes a comfort zone, it is familiar and for whatever reason familiarity is comfortable, no matter how unhappy it makes us.  For me, there were times when my misery was part of my martyrdom, sometime only I knew I was feeling like a martyr, it really doesn't work well when no one else is aware that you are being a martyr, so eventually I stopped.
Happiness is another thing altogether.  With happiness you have something to lose, in fact you have a lot to lose.  That is probably why I havn't risked it to often.  Because it is a risk.  What if the person or the thing that is making you happy leaves you, or is taken away from you?  I am not ususally a big risk taker.  I fear losing what I love.  In the past I have left people that I love before they could leave me.  Being lonely, alone and afraid are feelings that are familiar to me and like I said earlier familaiar feelings are at least comfortable, you know what to expect and there is little to no risk.
I was happy in my work for many years and it was taken away from me by people I had befriended, helped  and trusted.  That experience left me in a place where it was very unlikely that I would trust again.  As I mentioned in an earlier blog, when I moved in with my daughter and her family, I spent a whole year or more cocooning, hardly venturing outside.  it was a time when I really identified with animals "licking their wounds" because that was how I felt, wounded.  I ever so slowly ventured out, and even when I did I kept people at a real distance, possibly I still do.  In 3 years there are perhaps 3 peole that I would trust with my feelings, and even then I would trust each one of them with only some of my feelings and at the first slight feeling of rejection I would back off so quickly and so far that I alarmed them.
Am I ready to be happy and to trust again?  I don't know.  I hope so.  I have been contolled by abandonment issues my entire life, so much so that I realize I made them into a self fulilling prophesy.  I hope I am healed enough and well enough to be happy again.

Monday, March 21st, 2011...............11:03p.m.