I'll Take Happiness, Please by Guest Blogger, Clara

Please welcome SFP's very first guest blogger, Clara!

A little background info to start us off: It occurred to me recently how much my spiritual well being relies on the support of others. When my well is dry, I need to replenish, and I do this often. I am blessed to have many friends and colleagues who are of the earth, as I like to describe them. For some, this stuff is too touchy feely. I get that. Then, these posts are not your cup of tea. But for others that are having a hard day, or in the midst of a crisis or just want to be reminded of the brighter side of life, these posts will be something I hope you look forward to. I wanted to combine my two passions: photography and spirituality.

To sum it up, the guest blogger series runs like this: The guest and I set up a portrait session in a location of the guest's choice. The guest writes on a topic that is close to their heart at the moment, I like to call it an "ah-ha!" moment. Then, without reading the post, I edit the images. Once done, the photos and words are combined and posted to the SFP blog. If you have feedback, please do leave a note! It would be great to hear from you and it would make the guest blogger feel good, too.

Without further adieu, please meet Clara and read her inspiring words:

On Saturday, I spent one of the happiest days of my life. I got up early, bathed, dressed and made my face up carefully. “We’re going out,” I told myself. “We’re going to have a wonderful day.”

I’ve had to get over thinking it’s weird to talk to myself like that. I’ve realized it’s necessary in order to heal years of toxic head-chatter. My version of God was once so punishing that I thought—in that unexamined way one can think—that I deserved all the abuse I was dishing out inside my own head. I thought I deserved to be unhappy. That it was my fate. That suffering proved something worthy about me and my value to the world.

Undoing this conviction has been the work of decades. In the course of it, I have uncovered many truths I did not want to face. Such as, for example, that the mere fact I wanted something powerfully and truly was the sign I wasn’t supposed to have it. How screwed up is that? The more I wanted it, the more I believed I wouldn’t get it, and wasn’t supposed to get it.

Naturally, such a conviction set up so much anxiety about wanting anything at all that I either tried not to want things (impossible for me, as I am a creature of powerful desires), or I tried to figure out how to get some of what I wanted but not all of it. That way, my unconscious reasoned, I could keep that punishing angel from realizing what was going on and springing into action to deny me, once again, fulfillment and happiness. Recognizing this pattern filled me with shame—which, naturally, was not so helpful.

Yet, over time, I have come to see that the genesis of that masochistic pattern was, deep down, love. Deep, deep down was a little girl who loved and wanted to be loved, and who saw, incorrectly but passionately, that if she sacrificed herself, perhaps those she loved would be happy and perhaps they would love her in return.

Deep, deep down, still deeper and older, was the mother of that little girl, who had come to similar conclusions about happiness and love and sacrifice. And of course, there was the father of that little girl, who had come to his own conclusions about how to earn love. And before them, were their mothers and fathers, my grandparents, and before them, their parents, and on and on, back to some woman and man on the plains of Africa, whoever they may have been, the mother and father of us all, and back beyond them, lightening striking in the primordial seas, and life, somehow or other beginning. Underneath a lot, if not all of it was love, however suffering, however twisted around and distorted, however muted, however confused.

Despite the loneliness I felt in the center of my own drama, my mistaken ideas about happiness were so far from uncommon. Rather, they are the ground on which many of us walk, literally as common as dirt. It’s so easy to be unhappy, particularly in old, familiar ways. What’s hard is to commit to being happy. What’s hard is to believe we are supposed to be happy. It has certainly been a long, hard struggle for me.

And on Saturday, somehow, I arrived at happiness. Deep down, deep dish happiness. For years, I’ve been undoing the knots inside me, and becoming happier and clearer, bit by bit by bit. But there had remained the deepest division—my self from my self. That’s a split any unhappy person recognizes. On Saturday, I felt like I was celebrating a honeymoon: my self had finally knitted its broken heart together. Another way to put it would be to say that my soul had joined the rest of me, or that I had finally found God inside me. Any of those would do, but the truest word for it is simply ‘love.’ Hence the word “honeymoon.” I was celebrating finding love in every corner of my being.

I had a perfect day, tailored to my own simple interests: a trip to a museum in San Francisco; shopping at a department store downtown; a hike in the hills at dusk with my dog. It was a day for me. It wouldn’t have suited everybody, but it wasn’t meant to. It was meant for me, as I am, here and now, a happy woman at last in love with her life.