Beauty over pain. Adventure over agony. Life is what you choose to see. – Andra Watkins
I don’t often write about my life before I met MTM, but I was an adult for fifteen years before we married. At twenty-two, I believed I ‘should’ be married. I engaged in a six-week courtship with a preacher-boy, said yes when he proposed, and married him five months later. Warnings screamed from all quarters, but I ignored them. This man was everything I believed a husband should be. I knew he’d make me happy.
But life with him was an exercise in crossing lines. He told me who to be, what to wear, how to behave, who my friends could be. And when I rebelled against his vision of me, I paid in ways I won’t recount (though you’ll probably read scenes from my former life in various novels someday.) I never knew agony could shred me to my marrow. It almost destroyed my soul.
When I finally found the courage to end it, I embarked upon a new opportunity. At twenty-seven, I could finally determine who I was, what I wanted, how to be happy. An adventure yawned before me.
Instead, I chose agony. Being alone meant I failed as a female, and what would people think? I fell into a relationship with another controller and spent almost four years trying to be the woman of his dreams. A woman who wasn’t me, because he dumped me in glorious fashion in the wake of my thirty-first birthday.
For two years, I railed against my aloneness. My rejected state. I watched other women fall into relationships and hated them for finding the one thing that eluded me: true happiness with a man, because of course a man meant happiness.
And because I couldn’t find a man to love me, I was forced to set aside my agony. Sometimes, I actually lived. I found restaurants I liked and cities to explore and art I appreciated and a home of my own. Oh, I still sobbed on my bedroom floor because I didn’t want to be alone. Agony was my old bedfellow. It wasn’t easy to let him go.
Somewhere in my stupid wanderings, I figured out happiness isn’t another person. It doesn’t live in the next thing or the next friend or the next meal or the next whatever. Happiness is an adventure every single day, because I can wake up and BE it.
I pen this post after spending part of an evening discussing happiness with someone I’ve known almost two decades. I love this person, even though she sometimes drives me insane. We want the people we love to make good choices, to gravitate toward edifying things, to avoid suffering and agony, misery and despair.
And maybe we endure those things so that when people come to our door, broken and agonized, we can hug them. We can tell them we love them. We can challenge them to embark upon the grand adventure called happiness.
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12 Comments
They always say you have to be happy with yourself before you can be happy with anyone else. Glad you became happy with yourself AND found MTM in the end. 🙂
“Happiness is an adventure every single day, because I can wake up and BE it.” So true, Andra. And I needed these words today, because I have a tendency to look at what I don’t have and complain. 🙁 A very bad habit.
Some folks never DO figure out that happiness is a choice, and it’s usually an Every. Single. Day choice. Happily, 😉 you’re not one of those.
Yep. Given the choice would you be miserable or joyous? Seems obvious. But why do people all too often choose misery? It IS a choice. Humans are endlessly fascinating.
Beautiful Andra. Simple. Beautiful.
I chose to be happy six years ago and have never regretted it. Some days I think it would be nice to meet a wonderful man and get married again, but most often I don’t worry about it because my life seems so full with family and friends. This is a wonderful post, Andra. I’m glad you found MTM and are there for your friends.
I have always felt that you need to experience unhappiness before you can really understand what happiness is all about. Nice post
this is wonderful, andra, and I’m so happy you found your way –
I reblogged this http://starsrainsunmoon.com/2016/03/28/andra-watkins-adventure-or-agony/ Because it was very inspiring and I want people to read it. I gave your link back and credit.
I know far too many people multiple decades into life still not clear on the fact that two unhappy people don’t create one happy couple. Learning how to live on your own and begin to grab happiness on your own terms flexed your resiliency muscles and your happiness quotient increased. Personal responsibility for our own happiness seems to ring more true for some than others. I’m glad you’re in the “some” category.
This is lovely.
Happiness is not found in another person. That’s the icing on the cake. 🙂
Brava, Andra! Glad you had the courage to set out on your own. And the adventures you’ve had since were only possible because of your independence.
I’ve had two “controlling” husbands – the first was overtly controlling, the second much more passive about it. Both of my husbands were nice guys; they just didn’t know how to live easily with an independent woman. I’m very happy living alone, and I wouldn’t risk another long-term commitment. I do think that some of the male control issues (as well as female submission issues) are part of our programmed, instinctive responses, reinforced by societal “norms.”
I’m sure that most of the hysterical women of the late nineteenth century were victims of the control-plus-ignorance social structure imposed upon women of the time. Freud saw a psychological bounty waiting to harvest. Since then we’ve come a long way, Baby. But we still have a long way to go. Keep on traveling!
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