13 Keys to Happily Ever Now
So you’ve heard of this thing Happily Ever After?
Well, it doesn’t exist. But something better does.
It’s called Happily Ever Now. (And Cinderella knew it too. I’ll tell you how I know in another post).
First a personal story.
When I was single and going through my pregnancy alone, I suffered extreme anxiety and depression. I thought, “No, this just can’t be. How is this happening? Life wasn’t supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”
I started getting panic attacks so bad I was afraid to be around anybody. One time with my parents, instead of joining them inside their friends’ house where a party was happening, I locked myself in their car. I stayed there 3.5 hours. I even peed my pants while waiting in the car because the thought of being around people was worse than wetting myself. Yeah, healthy people don’t do that, I know. I was not healthy; I was a real wreck.
Thankfully, I’m not such a wreck anymore.
I share all this with you just in case any of you out there think your mental problems are so big I wouldn’t be able to relate. Trust me on this one, I can relate. And standing where I am today (on the other side of peeing my pants) I can actually say I’m grateful for the experience of that major meltdown. It was there inside being a complete wreck that I discovered the keys to happily ever now.
Here is what I figured it out: I thought my life was over because I thought I was disqualified from ever experiencing happily ever after. In the state I was in– pregnant, single, poor as a rock and mentally falling a part– I believed my future was shot.
Then a shift happened.
I decided to stop focusing on the happily-ever-after-fairytale-thing, and start creating a real-as-can-be-happily-ever-now-thing.
Here are 13 keys to Happily Ever Now.
These are baby-steps I actually used and still use.
1. Name the small things that you love, that bring you joy.
2. Make health and well-being a priority.
3 .Get hyper-local on ways you can make a difference.
4. Touch the grass with your bare feet. Smell flowers. Learn to memorize a favorite poem.
5. Rekindle broken dreams or reinvent new ones and set new ones.
6. Borrow someone else’s faith (if you can’t find your own).
7. Remember that the only door to future happiness is happiness now.
8. Confess your fears, your mistakes.
9. Forgive. Go back and forgive again. Forgive your parents. Forgive God. Forgive high school. Forgive yourself.
10. Speak kind words of encouragement and appreciation over yourself as often as you can– every stop light; every ride up the elevator; every time you check the mirror for spinach in your teeth.
11. Shift focus from your monstrous big goals into daily, doable baby steps.
12. Learn to sit quietly and enjoy just your breathing.
13. Wear nice underwear.
For starters pick one of these things that resonates with you and stick with it. I love this quote by John Quincy Adams,
Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
Trust me, I know the road to happily ever now is full of obstacles. I know how frustrating it is to hear about ‘patience and perseverance’ after you’ve been knocked down for the 99th consecutive time in a day. I get all that. But the keys to happily ever now are still available to us. They are not a potion or a spell, but a practice. Make them part of your life to see their benefit. Give them 6 months before you give up on them. Which one or two are you going to start with today? I’d love to here from you in the comments.
