Enjoying

Enjoying
Read something today over in this post on Subversive Harmony. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in the post but as I was reading this line struck me:

“Do things you enjoy because you enjoy them, and enjoy the things you do on their own terms. Anything else is icing.”

Way back in the day, shortly after getting out of the hospital and once I was able to get out and around a little bit, this was almost exactly the mantra I started to live by. So much of my depression could be tied to not only the abuse I suffered as a child, but my overwhelming obsession with justifying everything I chose to do. Every choice I made, every activity I got involved in had to have a higher purpose. If I was watching TV by myself it had to be something educational, or if I was going to watch a movie I had to do it with someone else so it could be part of a relationship building thing because we were spending time together. I couldn’t allow myself the simple freedom to do something because it was fun.

It’s funny, because from the outside I’m sure the changes I made seemed a little bizarre. I mean shortly after I, finally, got back to working again, I signed up to play rollerhockey. The league fee was $55 and since I had just spent more than a year being unemployed there were plenty of other things that money could have gone towards. But, it wasn’t going to make or break me at that time, it just meant I’d be a little bit later in paying off some other things. That $55 was spent on doing something for me, something that I enjoyed and something that played a small, but signifcant role in helping me get my life back again. It was something that made me feel like a normal person again, part of a normal group. That was the icing that came from doing something just because I enjoyed it, and it was maybe one of the best decisions I had ever made up to that point in my life.