For the past month or so, I have wanted a change. I am moving to the next suburb over in a week and a half and I decided that would be my start date. Moving into a house with better airflow (hence not being so discouraged to go running or walking outside in 100-degree weather just to come back to an 80-degree house), and more space (I will have room to drag my college kitchen appliances out of storage and actually use them to prepare healthy food other than grilled cheese sandwiches and Spaghetti-O’s), and cheaper rent ($150 extra per month for more fruits and veggies, to put towards a Polar USA fitness watch/blender/food processor), and overall, the feeling of “a fresh start.”
Piggy-backing on my desire to learn how to cook things other than grilled cheese sandwiches and pasta bakes, exercise to burn off the past year of grilled cheese sandwiches and pasta bakes (see this theme of grilled cheese…I seriously probably have about 5-7 a week), and be healthy in general….I want to be happier. I was telling my boyfriend the other night about this. I’m not unhappy, per se, because my life isn’t miserable. Oh, of course, it sometimes seems like my check engine light comes on the same day I was late for work, have an expensive doctor’s appointment, and have $5.63 in my banking account, making me sob inconsolably into the phone about how much my life sucks. Let’s be real though…those days are few and far between. And I’m still here. I still have enough money for rent, and food, and car payments, and student loans, and the occasional movie and dinner combo date. I feel stressed though – constantly rushing, always adding to that mental list rotating through my brain of stuff I want to do “one day.” When does “one day” actually happen? May 17th, 2025? Is that “one day?” Probably not. I will probably greet that day with my list and realize I’m dropping a kid off somewhere, harping on my husband to go to the dentist, coming home to a messy house, and exhausted from work. I, once again, will say “I’ll do these one day, but not today.”
Enter my happiness project. In the midst of me feeling like something has to change – I need to be happier in my day-to-day, stop getting frustrated/annoyed/stressed about little things, be nicer to the people in my life who truly try to make it easier (see mainly: boyfriend, God love him), and be able to do the things I’ve always wanted to do but just never made time for. So all these thoughts and wishes were swirling around in my brain when I got an email from the library saying one of the books on my hold list was available. Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. I had added it to my list a month prior when I was trying to improve my daily happiness. I’ve blazed through it this past week. Gretchen is a lawyer-turned-writer, who decided to devote a year to becoming “happier.” Each month had a theme broken down into individual resolutions that she worked on, trying to carry each month’s resolutions into the next month. By the end of the year, she would have clean closets, make more time to play with her kids, not nag her husband, etc. My OCD mind with my love for writing was instantly hooked. So “My bHappy Project” was born.
This blog will follow my efforts in the next year to become a happier person. In the next few posts, I’ll outline my monthly themes for the year, the “commandments” I came up with to live by, and a few other random lists. Because as we go on, you’ll see I love lists. They make me happy, thus, they’re definitely a big part of the bHappy Project.
So here I go…
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