On Being Furiously Happy

Some of you may have noticed (or will notice soon) that I'm using the term "furiously happy". If you aren't familiar with Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess), first of all, you don't know what you are missing, and second of all, you will not have seen this video. 

Humour me and watch it. It's less than 10 minutes and I swear, it can change the world. 

(I also invite you to read the hilarious original blog post about being furiously happy, along with a recent update.) 

As the days get shorter (this is a really untruthful expression, actually, because the days are still 24 hours long, and I still have 8.33 hours of work to do during the day and however much shit to get done around the house in the evening, but I'm having to do it all with seasonal affected disorder and a hormonal imbalance and OMG it's getting dark so early and can you tell from my writing style that I've been reading a lot by Jenny Lawson lately?), I will start struggling. I do every year. For the past few years, since Moe was born, it hasn't been as bad for one reason: I can't afford to let it be bad. I don't have the time or resources to curl up in a ball and hide from the world, no matter how much I may want to, because there's a little boy who is depending on me to be there for and with him. And I refuse to let him down.

And so this year, as the dark gets longer (I think that works much better than "as the days get shorter," don't you?) I am resolved to be furiously happy about at least one thing a day. Yesterday, it was the fact that Moe was standing in the living room, naked from the waist down (but wearing glow-in-the-dark Lightning McQueen fuzzy Crocs) wearing a styrofoam crown that we had made and decorated together from packaging from a box of wine glasses. This made me furiously happy. 

Every day, I will find one moment where I can embrace the present and let joy fill me up. And I will be furiously happy. 

Because let's face it. Despite chemical imbalances, seasonal affected disorders, wading through the murk of being a working mom and trying to find the right equation of being a mom, a wife, an employee, a woman and my own sweet selfish self, I have an awful lot of things in my life that I can be furiously happy about.

I invite you to join me.