Academy of Happiness

Sybile

I have enrolled in the Academy of Happiness.  But to understand the significance of this event you need to know the background influences.

Only in my forties did I sense the niggling possibility that I have a recurrent mental condition. Not a hormonal one that plagues some unlucky sufferers, but an acquired one for sustained terror in my teens due to neglectful inaction (see Sybile above). We are not going there on this journey, but after years of coping, and fighting rare but serious rages that incapacitated me for weeks at a time, it sank in when my mother died that I harbour demons from my teen years. Demons is the name I give these physical forces that I had been stuffing back into their locked cells in my mind as I gained control of each bout. There is nothing biblical about them, but the name conjures up exactly the right connotation.

Somehow I never harmed my children, at least not physically, but I wonder if my screaming anger at them once in a while was harmful. I can't go there though. The most I can say in my defense is that we enrolled in a child behaviour class to help guide the children properly, my thinking being that I needed help child rearing. It was helpful, but my rages were more directed to my husband from then on.

He bore the brunt of my demons lashing out, and my being such a talented wordsmith I learned to tailor my attacks to any of his faults. The obvious one was his work addiction. I think we both were convinced for years that this was the root of our problems.

Nevertheless we carried on, mostly successfully, until my mother became mortally Ill.  Skipping to the end of this nightmare time, suffice to say that she was cruel and all-consuming to me in that time. My chains attached to her were almost lethally binding, leaving me torn, with old wounds re-inflicted. I was incapable, for at least year, of giving myself to my needy children:  The one graduating, the one having a baby, and the one strong daughter who equally needed my presence.

Fast forward to the present, because there are about a thousand pages in between, and just believe me when I say that it was recently that I tried to label my condition. This was in order to attempt some ongoing control over the damned Houdini demons lurking over my shoulder. My symptoms mostly fitted into Depression, but nagging at me was my nemesis, Rage.  Then after emerging raggedly from my most recent, and one of my most Epic battles, it was pointed out that PTSD is a candidate.

No label will ever be my Weapon of Mass Destruction toward the Demons, but knowledge is power, and I'm going with PTSD. I can't afford therapy, but I am smart and determined, so I have enrolled in the Academy of Happiness. It's an exclusive institution with a distinguished enrollment of exactly one. I will learn how to use the tools of the trade, and free myself to spend as many "moments in time" as I wish. There is no Cure for me.  I will always harbour my cruelest Demons, but at least I can diminish their strength by refusing to feed them, like the Gremlins of Hollywood.

Next time I will write about my early days on this adventure of the mind. Already I can feel the Demons shaking in their boots at the prospect of a long siege. En garde!