Who I want to be when I grow up

It is easy to lose track of who you are and who you want to be. You can wake up in the morning and forget yourself and go to sleep at night, without realizing that you missed anything. Even when you do recognize what you are missing, sometimes you feel hopeless and helpless to make the changes you know are necessary in your life. Days can seem endless, or they can flow by as fast as your heart rate after a long run. Sometimes you wish you could move on to the next day, and other times you wish you could hold on to the last. But regardless of how hard you try to escape or how hard you try to hold on, the fact is that you can't control which days last and which days don't. All you can do is continue to wake up, do your best, and go to sleep.

Sometimes your best isn't good enough, and you struggle to do better while days pass by either too quickly or too slowly no matter how strong your will is.

Lately, my best hasn't been what I want it to be, and I have been struggling every day to make it better. I wake up full of stamina but by the time I get up and ready for the day I feel exhausted more than I really should be, as if there were a leak in my tank, and no matter how many times I refill my tank with stamina it burns out just as fast as before. I've tried out different patches... thinking more positively, eating healthier, sleeping better, but no matter what physical changes I make to my routines I still run out of stamina fairly quickly. The solution somehow still escapes me.

I know now that it is a mental battle rather than a physical one. I am fighting against my own mental illness. I am fighting against lifelong depression. I've been battling against the idea that there is something wrong with me all my life. I have been unwilling to admit that I am unhappy, because I didn't want to admit that something is wrong. I didn't want to give my illness power by giving it recognition. Now I realize that by not admitting that I am unhappy I gave my unhappiness power over me. I can only have power over my own happiness when I allow myself to admit that I am unhappy.

Once I realized that I am unhappy and that I have been unhappy for quite some time, I wanted to know when I was happiest, I wanted to know what made me unhappy. I thought long and hard, and I realized that I can't remember a time in my life when I was truly happy inside.

My mother sent me a bunch of pictures of me as a young child. I don't remember what my life was like when I was a young child, but I looked at my baby picture and I saw a beautiful child that deserved to have happiness. I told myself that I needed to create my own happiness, that I needed to give true happiness to this little child who does not know what happiness feels like.

It isn't easy to admit to one's self or to those around you that you are unhappy. People who know me think of me as one of the happiest people they know, and expect me to be happy all the time. But the truth is that I am not happy and I don't know what it feels like to be happy.

My goal for the next two years is to be happy. My goal is to create my own happiness. My goal is to listen to that little child and become exactly who she wants me to be. I know that I will find happiness when I find myself. I know that she is here somewhere, waiting to be found.

I am going to chronicle my journey by writing about what little part of her I find every day, until my search is complete.

GIRL IN A PINK BERET