Over the past several months, I have begun to understand that in order to move through life, I have to learn to be happy with myself before being happy with anything else in my life. Life can always throw things at us that can make us challenged and stressed. There can be many reasons to be unhappy with ourselves but nothing will ever be resolved within until we are happy with ourselves first.

Throughout many of my adult years, I was a very disgruntled person. I always had a very negative outlook on myself and life. Many times I found things that I struggled with to be passively funny. It made life with me and my parents who I was living with before I lived on my own very difficult. Part of that could have been that I was unhappy living with them at times. But what I did not also realize until a certain point in my life until I started to connect with my peers at day services more that I was considered more of a jerk than a peer and this made it difficult to connect with anyone on a deeper social level including my coworkers and the ability to do my job well.

Over the past decade that has immensly changed and living independently has greatly improved things on many levels in that regard. Although there were many struggles of living independently for many years in the beginnning, most of them have waned out along with the struggles I faced in daily living in particular how I navigated to and from work and day services. Even when that was potentially on the chopping block earlier this year, I had great fears or regression. Eventually as the lack of medication adherance waned and medication adherance became understood as essential for daily living, things started to get better for me.

Part of this was also learning about myself and learning how to manage my challenges that life has thrown at me. Granted autism and my other challenges are not easy to bear, but learning how to live with them better along with understanding how much all of my psychotropic medications are valuable tools in making my life more managable has gone a long way in improving my quality of life. I am still working on letting go of things of the past and the things that have hurt me, but I also know that will take a lot of time.

Alas, it will take alot for me to work at being happier with myself and I also understand that there is alot that I need to do to allow myself to do the sweat equity to be happy with myself despite all the things that go on in my life. It can be hard sometimes and I do understand that life ebbs and flows. Things will happen that may trigger things to make life stressful but I must understand that we are all human and things will occur in life that I must choose to make the best of things in life as they come.

Being happy with myself is indeed a process as I continue to learn and grow on this what seems like a continous path of self discovery that I go through. Life is going to throw me curveballs and I understand that. I have resilence and know that I need to be strong for many too but if I am not happy with myself then it will be difficult to live the other parts of my life that can be challenging and hard to see the good parts of them too.