While watching America’s Got Talent, I saw Jane Marczewski also known as Nightbirde sing a song she had written, “It’s Okay” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZJvBfoHDk0 Nightbirde had cancer and, sadly it took her life. She brought her song to life because she decided it was okay that it would be ending. Then she said this:
“You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy”.
Those words struck me deeply. They took me back to when my life suddenly became hard in every way imaginable and that’s where I lived for years. For a long time, I put on a happy face, but I wasn’t happy, far from it.
I let myself live in a world where everything was hard. Gazing out windows, I saw only what I thought would never be in my life again. I was terrified of ever putting my feet on the ground again. I was terrified of being in the world at all.
What did I have to be happy about. Seriously, I couldn’t walk a straight line, I couldn’t see without a blur and bounce before my eyes. I fell resulting in bumps and bruises, and it made me bleed. I wasn’t happy at all. Just writing this makes me sob of how my life was taken from me nothing to be happy about, nothing.
I was going mad thinking of what disappeared and unable to see beyond it. I had to reach out for help, I needed to be lifted up to know I had the strength to move beyond. I found an amazing therapist who helped me realize that I can put on a true happy face. I learned that I couldn’t wait until my life wasn’t hard anymore before I decided to be happy.
It was hard work to get there, to begin looking for happiness. I learned the only way to do this was to let go of the hard part, the part that was consuming me. Difficult to believe, the hard part taught me a lot, and I didn’t know it. I began comparing my hard with the happy things I had before the hard appeared, and the happy that did show up after. I had no idea that happy was looking for me. It wanted to revive my skills and help me move on. What I had prior to the hard was happiness, what caused me deep pain was my trauma causing me to build a wall preventing any happiness to appear. But I remembered how happy felt and little by little, began chipping away at bricks, and found that the power of hard were tools to bring back my power of happy. If hard had the ability to hold me in its grip, so could happy.
So, “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy”.
