Like many before have written, reaching for happiness outside of oneself is an illusion – we’re really getting dopamine fixes. So basically we’re addicts.

Before my divorce and retirement, I can honestly say my life was by and large focused on externally placating. I rarely felt delight, contentment, or satisfaction – I was always thinking about ‘what’s next?’. And that’s not for a lack of trying at all. I savored whenever possible.

My schedule was packed with making other’s commitments work for them. Instead of “joy”, I felt periods of relief when especially burdensome tasks were done – like birthing my sons or their birthday party was finally cleaned up.

This was the model I grew up with so I can’t really be “blamed”.

While my mother was self-absorbed with illness (which I often think of as I’ll-ness – since when she was symptomatic, it was all about her and the rest of us disappeared), my grandmother – her mother, was completely traditional.

She was always just cooking and cleaning. Most of her utterances were versions of complaints. She complained about her husband, her children, and us. She didn’t drive. They bickered continuously.

None of us measured up. When she compared and gossiped – her face became unhappily contorted. That’s just the way it was. My father’s mother was a drinker- at least whenever we came for a visit. By eleven when we arrived and were forced to kiss her, she reeked of scotch.

Both grandfathers were self-made millionaires. They worked and hustled every day. They were workaholics. They both drove new Cadillacs. They looked like success and happiness.

Seeing a TV show where everyone was all “happy” seemed completely foreign to me- like “All in the family” or similar. I thought (and by and large still think) happiness, contentment as seen on TV, is artificial- at least for the women or wo(e)-men – those in charge of all the loose ends and managing grief.

TV is an amazingly effective brainwashing instrument to keep its viewers feeling discontented- and unhappy. It also provides its remedies of medications, alcohol use, and sex or suggests these either with ads and portrayed activities. To give us viewers watching plots awash in manipulation and sexual violence, ideas of what we can do when we feel unhappy- or have been victims ouselves.

Since my retirement and divorce, I got rid of it and don’t miss it at all.If you’re feeling happiness is fleeting, I suggest you do too.

Men by and large have both their cake and eat it. They get home from their narrow spectrum of intense work – maybe work out, then kick back with a libation- or so that was my story. (My ex- is a surgeon)

Yeah, I am kind of jealous of their condition; I worked as a doctor too – and still “did it all” but got no cake at all.

I don’t think elevating their comfort all the time actually makes the world any better – at least not for all those who are scurrying around them trying to meet every whim.

I know they complain, but their complaints are hollow. They deny their own actually markedly elevated conditions relative to those in their own lineages. Working for even more driven bosses, they outsource their personal passion into arguing sport statistics, political polemics, and overexercising.

What is true though – they are lonely and have little other vocabulary; in many ways they are extremely ignorant. (Politics are ~personality contests regardless of whatever issues you identify with). Men seem unable to care for themselves. Even the guy I almost dated, brought up his mommy right away – he’s 70.

By pigeon-holing wo(e)-men (and wo(mb)-men), they cut out another source of meaningful relationship. So 50% of the population isn’t available to them. (and vice-versa).

But then, I can’t blame them, this is how we’re educated. They don’t understand women’s worlds and take them for granted.As a wife, with my ex- it was like taking care of three children – not just my two sons. Conversations were about as interesting – or about his world of gore.

With my freedom, which is a great thing to be thinking about today on Juneteenth, I have found overall more satisfaction and contentment. Joy is rarer – but I actually experience more of that too now that I set my own time and destinations.

I feel happiest when I’ve ‘stuck to my plan’ – then I’ve got some real satisfaction. Is it lasting? Not really – like any Sisyphean activity, I get to keep reinvesting in it in order to get the results I want.

I love to make bread. I savor my meals. I give thanks for all my pretty dishes I get to wash and put away. I bless everything that happens to me.

I should mention that I’ve been mostly in a state of rapture too – having spontaneous upwellings of exhilaration, seemingly from my diaphragm area and spreading outwards multiple times throughout the day – ever since I heard some particularly tender words of affirmation when I wasn’t expecting it. I’ve written lots about that in my “L.D.” essays. (L.D. is for “Love Daemon” – as it was first experienced as an intrusive entity into my auric field.)