The Pursuit of Happiness

One of my all time favorite movies scenes is in the Pursuit of Happiness, where the character played by Will Smith gets told that he's been promoted and life is about to get very good for him. He is so relieved and so happy, that you can see the joy with out him even breaking a smile.

The giant joy and relief he felt in that movie, kind of captures how I have felt this week.

As you may or may not know, a little over a year ago marked the start of an extremely hard time for me. I had been attacked in the night by a violent teenager. While I was left fairly uninjured physically, it shook me up bad emotionally. Within a month of that I witnessed a suicide by hanging, and a friend collapse and die of a brain aneurism. 

Each event I tried to shake off, and tell myself I was ok. But all the events combined did in fact take a huge toll on me. The nightmare got worse when my doctor said the answer to my problems was anti depressants.

I learned later when I switched doctors, that anti depressants were NOT the answer, because I did not have a chemical imbalance causing my troubles, I just needed to talk and process about what I had been through. But the road to learning that was extremely costly. The anti depressants made me manic, which lead me to spend a gut load of money, money I didn't have, and I racked up a mountain of debt. All my life I have been remarkably skilled with money management. I had never had to deal with debt, because I always found ways to deal with it right when a cost came up. But due to this fiasco, I was in over my head.

Fast forward to this year, I have bounced back mentally and emotionally from the whole ordeal, but have still been dealing with a ton of debt that I couldn't pay. I have been trying my best, but still haven't been able to get the collections calls off my back. It has been very stressful and felt like there would be no end to it.

Then last Thursday came. The day of grace. A check came in for some grant money I had been awarded 2 years before. As I was handed the check I could hear Jimmy Cliff playing loudly in my head... now sing it with me, it's gonna be a bright, bright and sun shiney day....

With it, I was able to pay off all my debt, get some much needed car repairs done, and actually go out to eat at a nice place for a change. `Tis a good day!


Btw, have you seen my new haircut?