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PWB Survival Tactic #1: Happy/Not Happy - plus random memes and poll! [1]

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Date: 2025-01-23

Hi guys! I am feeling fairly somber today, and a bit introspective. There’s no way we can pretend the next four years are likely to be anything other than horrific on many levels, and yet living in a state of horror for that length of time does us no good at all. It’s exhausting. It destroys your health. And it leaves one with little energy or enthusiasm with which to fight.

So I was thinking about that — how do we live with a constant buffeting of WTF?/OMG! without getting completely burned out? — and then I got thinking about my sister.

Now, I know I come across as bouncy and cheerful 90% of the time, especially here in the PWB diaries, and in fact that is pretty much my default setting, but it’s hardly all of me. My childhood was a thoroughly effed-up combination of economic privilege and abuse — it all looked very, very pretty from the outside, but the interior was a chamber of horrors.

And yet I turned out fairly cheerful and my sister… well, didn’t. She’s miserable and angry and resentful the vast majority of the time. And it sucks, both to be around her and to see her like that.

And in the process of asking myself what made the difference between us, I was reminded of a few things — skills, mental habits, whatever you want to call ‘em — I picked up along the way that might be useful in surviving the next four years mentally intact :-)

Helmets r gud fur portekking ur braynz!

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One thing that I suspect made a great deal of difference was getting very, very lucky with the first therapist I had as an adult. He was quite young, in retrospect, but quickly tumbled to the fact that I was so out of touch with my emotions that I literally couldn’t tell him what I was feeling because I didn’t know. So in order to start building some emotional vocabulary, one of the things we did was a game called Happy/Not Happy, where he would prompt me to think of certain things (puppies, for example) and report whether thinking of that thing made me happy or not happy.

Happee!

Nawt Happee

Happee!

Nawt Happee

Over time I got better and more exact at identifying and communicating what was going on with me internally — but in the process I learned two VERY IMPORTANT things:

My internal mood often had very little to do with external events

When I looked at pictures of or thought about things that made me happy, they made me happy! Right then, in that very moment. Even if I was sad or anxious, thinking of something that made me happy made me less sad and less anxious!

This was, to me, a staggering discovery. It’s hardly groundbreaking — the Pootie Queen herself knew this relationship between what we concentrate on and how we feel instinctively, I am certain — but for me it was an absolute lightning bolt. It’s not about simply denying or ignoring whatever is painful in our lives; it is simply refusing to give those painful things power over how we feel. (Inasmuch as possible, of course!)

So, although I’m quite sure the vast majority of us know this already, this is my first offering in this little survival tactic mini-series:

Think about happy things. It’ll make you happy!

And one thing that makes me happy is posting lots of fun, random memes for you guys, so here we go!

It’s very hard to impress a husky…

Malamutes make me happy!

Aging fabulously!!

x She may be old, but she did herself proud.. 😊 — Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden.bsky.social) 2025-01-17T21:24:27.847Z

Me attempting anything new:

And one final HAPPEE!!!!

Happy Purrsday, everyone!!!

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