I feel that an epiphany has been made, one that I probably should have made a long time ago. And I think that maybe I ought to share it with the world. Or at least, with the 6 people that actually read this bloody thing. And anybody who reads to the end gets a gold star. Because this sucker is long.
I've realized that people who say that we choose who we are live in a fantasy world. Life is 90% what we are given and 10% what we do with it. We're all given problems, insecurities, situations, and downfalls that we have to overcome. These things are mostly unavoidable, and these are the things that we strive on a daily basis to hide from everybody. These are those culmination of little quirks that make us, well, us. This unique combination of quirks, attributes, feelings and responses what make us not one in a million, but one in seven billion. These are things that we cannot choose.
So only about 10% of life is choice. We choose how best to handle situations based upon what we know of ourselves. We choose how we think we ought to behave based on things society base as normal (or, as is often the case for me, behave specifically to go against the things society says are normal.) And one thing that I think we definitely choose is how we are happy.
I'm gonna take a big pause here for a second, because I think that this needs to be said: This next section is not directed towards or meant to offend anybody at all. However, I think that one of the 10% of things we choose is what offends us. So make a conscious choice NOW not to get offended by what is said next. Cool beans? Cool beans.
I look around myself and see a lot of people who are happy. And do you know why? Because they've decided to cast aside the 90% of themselves that they can't control, and choose wisely the 10% that they can. I think that's what life's all about, is finding those things that satisfy that 10% of you, and keep your mind of the 90%. Me, I like to make other people laugh, smile, sigh, shake their heads in disgust, or just roll their eyes and say "yup, that's Tommy for ya." That's where I find my happiness. Unfortunately, this means I find my happiness in other people's happiness, which makes me a sponge of positivity or negativity, depending on what people are putting out.
I'm a strong believer in energies. I think that everybody surrounds themselves with a unique energy depending on their mood, and that there are some people who can walk into a room and just completely change the mood of everybody around them. We all know those people. The people that can walk into a room and just light it up, or the people who can suck all the happiness from a room just by being around. I try to surround myself with the former, seeing as how when even just a few people around me are in a bad mood, I tend to get in a bad mood myself. I'm not really sure why. Just part of my 90%.
Another big part of my 90% is the fact that I've been diagnosed with clinical depression. Around my 12th birthday, I began to wake up and feel miserable with no reason at all. I would get out of bed, drag myself to school, sit alone and ignore everybody, then go home and cry 'til I cried myself to sleep. This had absolutely no purpose and was one of the worst three weeks of my life. Recently, I've seen a relapse in this. While it was not nearly as bad, and only lasted for a few hours at most, I've really been trying to combat it. It's been an uphill struggle, it really has, to try to keep my mood normal enough to where I feel stable enough to even leave my dorm.
But as I reflected on a lot of things tonight, I realized that I've got a heck of a 10% to work with. While every day may be an uphill struggle, I've got 10% of my conscious effort that I can devote to making myself as happy as possible. And you know what? That's plenty for me. Maybe it's because I'm not a math person, and I think that numbers are an ambiguous way to rationalization of things we can't control. Maybe I don't understand how very miniscule that 10% is. Or maybe, just maybe, I have my numbers completely backwards. Maybe 10% of life is what we're given and 90% is what we make of it.
You know what? I like that a whole lot better than the other way around. And that's why I'm not a math person.
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