"I'm Alive, I'm Alive, I'm Alive, I'm Alive" ....

    Lately, I’ve felt the need to write about my childhood. I’m not sure why… It’s just been a matter on my heart.

    The first time I got this feeling, I thought, “Oh, yeah. My childhood. That’ll be easy.” I figured I’d pick up a pencil, jot down a few things, and that’d be that. Well, I picked up my pencil… and nothing came. That’s not to say I don’t remember my childhood. I’ve been told that I have a uniquely good memory. In other words, I remember essentially everything that’s happened in my past. I remember things that no one has reminded me of, like Trevor and I playing with a red RC car in my grandmother’s apartment’s parking lot when I was, like, four years old. I remember going swimming with my dad in the pool at one of the apartment complexes in which I lived in Oregon, when I was not even two. I remember the day Trevor was born, getting to see him for the first time.

    The point is, I remember events really well. As big or as small as it is, I’ll usually remember it.

     So anyway, today, my mom was doing some cleaning, getting ready for a consultation with a customer, and she put in a Passion cd from, like, the late 90s. Blast. From the. Past. I knew every song on the cd, since we used to sing them all back in early JoL days. Song after song, I was overcome by the nostalgia. “You Alone” started playing, and I laughed, as I do every time I hear it. The bridge of the song is just singing “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive” no less than 16 times. As if that’s not ridiculous enough, it doesn’t even sound like “I’m alive”… Instead you have a whole bunch of people sounding like they’re singing, “I’m a lime, I’m a lime, I’m a lime, I’m a lime”.

    And that’s when it hit me… What makes it hard for me to write about my childhood, is that I can’t remember my emotion associated with the event. I remember doing things, and I assume I must have been happy, but I can’t remember actually being happy… Until today. Listening to “You Alone”, I remembered how happy I was when I was little. How happy my family was. Things didn’t always go right. My dad was rarely around because of work. The only times I got to see him were Wednesday nights, Thursday nights(which later became Tuesday nights), and Sundays. School was horrible… I was the target of bullying in my first and second grade classes. There were times when my family didn’t have a car, and when we did, AC was a rare thing for us. But despite everything, we were blessed, and we were happy.

    Remembering what it was like to be happy is one of the most incredible things I’ve experienced in a while. It’s been so long since I could honestly say that I’m happy. I’ve been excited, passionate, etc. But happy? Okay, so I’ve been happy over certain things. But as a stable emotion that I feel, it just hasn’t been there. Don’t ask me what has been there, I don’t even know. I do know that it hasn’t been happiness, though.

    It’s in our Declaration of Independence, that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness-”.

    So now I’m just asking myself… I have the right to pursue happiness… what have I been doing? Why haven’t I taken advantage of this?

    I don’t have to be afraid. I don’t have to be sad, depressed, angry, bipolar. My God created me to be joyful in His presence, that I would have inexplicable joy and that I could live my life without letting ANYTHING affect my happiness.

    So here’s to finally exercising my right to pursuing happiness, to reviving the care-free, joyful girl of my childhood, and to the start of a new blog dedicated to the happiness of my past, present, and future. And, above all, to an amazing God who wants nothing short of joy for me.

x♥x