The Under-Qualified But Overly Opinionated Weirdo’s Guide To Finding Happiness When Life’s Lemons Bury You: Chapter 1

I know you all were just waiting for me to start another book before my others are finished, but here we go anyway…. I don’t know much, but there are a few things I’ve learned so far. Please understand that this is the very first draft and completely unedited.

Chapter 1

Diagnosing Your Problems

Life isn’t exactly like a box of chocolates. Sure, you never know what you’re gonna get, but in many ways, if you’re paying attention, you can often predict exactly what you’re gonna get. No, I’m not saying you can predict the future or know everything that’s going to happen in your life, but, generally speaking, life is a hopefully long series of cause and effect. Newton’s Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I call that action a cause and the reaction the effect.

A cause can be literally anything: word, thought, action, emotion, experience, choice—you name it. And the effect is any result of that cause and can also be anything from consequence, thought, experience, or emotion.

To very much over simplify things, a+b=c or one thing leads to another. Somethings we won’t see coming because the world is full of other causes and effects (from other people, nature, etc.) and they all bounce off of and affect each other, but my theory is that if we, like God, had the capability of seeing and understanding all of these causes and effects, we could also know exactly what would happen to everyone at every single point in time forever.

Now, you’re probably thinking that this is a great theory, and that Laura is a straight up genius, and I should buy all her books. Thank you, you should. But I’m sure there are at least a few that are more like, “umm… great. How does your weirdo gibberish help me now when I’m broke, sad, overwhelmed…” [enter other adjective here]. Geesh, you’re impatient! But I get your point. sigh I’ll stop waxing philosophical (it’s a terrible habit anyway) now and get to the point.

Most of us spent at least some of our time worried about the future, current problems, or stuck in a never ending loop of past issues we can’t seem to overcome. (If you don’t, this book really isn’t for you. Go ahead and read on if you’d like, but you’d probably be better off doing something like solving world hunger or something. So if reading this is a waste of time—not my fault. You have been warned.)
For those of us mere mortals, these daily problems can fill out whole lives. They can seem like everything and that nothing you can do will ever change it.

But here’s the secret: Life is not an art. Life is a science. It’s a balance filled on one side with those causes and the other effects. To survive and succeed in life, we need to dig down and discover the main causes and effects that are dominating our life at the moment. If we, like doctors, can find the cause of a disease, we can work toward a cure that will chance the resulting effect.

Story time! I spent nearly twenty years slowly spiraling into poor health, morbid obesity, depression, anxiety, inactivity, an increased desire to become a hermit and never speak to another human being again, and began to pull away from the people I loved and everything that interested me. Needless to say, (but I apparently am anyhow) I was miserable, and I had no idea why.

I was trying to do everything I needed to do better. A therapist and I did an extensive exercise once that went though every aspect of my life and goals. We looked at the top things in life that were most important to me, what I wanted the most, and broke down what I could do to work toward those and what was already in progress. And guess what? For every single one of these goals and desires (like trying to be a good mom, educating myself, becoming financially stable and getting off of public assistance), I was already doing something to work toward improving or achieving it.

So why did I spend the next fourteen years or so feeling steadily more miserable and helpless? I was trying to metaphorically treat an infection when a metaphorical cancer was destroying me. In other words, I was focusing on the right symptoms or effects but trying to change the wrong cause. I was either unable or unwilling to understand that there was one basic, overarching problem that was affecting (and infecting) every single aspect of my life from my health to my sanity, and my ability to live my life. After seventeen years of marriage, I finally understood that I had been experiencing domestic violence.
And understanding that cause has changed everything. I finally understood how to change my life. It’s been hard. It’s been lonely and awful. But diagnosing and treating that so-called cancer has been the key to so many effects I didn’t understand and felt I couldn’t change. Now, I’m not perfect or living the best life I ever wanted or could imagine. It’s a process, and there’s a ton of healing, learning, and work involved. But there’s hope. And progress! I can’t even tell you how good it feels to announce that there is progress after so many years of peddling that bicycle up a hill and going nowhere.

It’s taken my whole life, but I am finally learning that if I don’t like something that is happening to me (or around me), nothing will change until that cause does. Getting out of that situation had been the major catalyst for change in my adult life. It was the main thing holding me back, at the time.
That’s they key here: at the time. Problem is, life keeps changing. Problems keep changing, and things happen. Solving one problem did help, but it also caused a myriad of other issues (like life as a single parent, the divorce process, etc.) Sometimes you have to open a wound to treat it, and some problems were there all along, but all you could see was the biggest one.

Problems will always pop up. There is no way to freeze time in a perfect moment. If we stop problem solving and working toward what we want, things will always get worse.

Life will never be perfect because we live in an imperfect world. But we can learn to live our best life and how to be happy with our time here. That’s what this book is about. This first chapter is one of the lessons I’ve learned, probably the that has impacted my life the most so far.

Like I said, life is a science not an art. And happiness in life requires you to become both a scientist and an artist. But don’t despair. This is good news! Science is evidence based and results are something that can be reproduced. So, there is hope for all of us.

I hope this survival guide is of use to somebody because I’d hate to think I’ve learned all this crud and written it all down for nothing. Enjoy and good luck! Read Chapter 2 here.