This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Dear Charlotte, which tells the winding story of the triumph and folly of forever trying to better yourself. This letter is from the chapter on "The Pursuit of Happiness."
Charlotte, my world is being turned upside down because of cognitive therapy. I'm dizzy with how fast my life is changing.
The biggest change has been to my work situation. I've finally snapped out of that never-ending fog of semi-work. You know those long stretches of weeks or months I mentioned, when I burnt through my savings while watching TV shows day-in day-out? I've snapped out of all that. It's so surreal for me to be out-and-about at 2 p.m. in my dress shirt, driving to a meeting with a client, then at 3 p.m. driving back to the bank to deposit a check. Banks are nearly empty at that hour, and this one time when I was weaving through the rope lines, it occured to me that I hadn't deposited a check in more than six months.
And it's all because of cognitive therapy. In one of my sessions, I asked myself to be brutally honest. I told myself to pick a number, between zero and ten, representing how much of a failure I really thought I was (10 being a total failure, 0 being not at all). After stewing on it, I picked the number "3". And as I hit the "3" on my keyboard, I felt like I had just swallowed a bitter pill. It's like I couldn't accept the truth, which is that I haven't really been a failure after college. And just by the act of speculating that I might be okay, my mind felt liberated.
In another session, I asked myself a bold question, "Since you hate your life so much, why don't you list out exactly what you like and dislike about it?" In one column I put down likes, and in another I wrote out dislikes. After five minutes of doing this, the likes column had become three times as long as the dislikes column. I had my health, I wasn't broke, and there was a bright side to my non-employment. I liked that I could wake up whenever I wanted, and I genuinely enjoyed all those episodes of The Sopranos I watched over a short period of time. This may sound like I was encouraging myself to be a bum, but it actually encouraged me to embrace life, with all its imperfections.
I've worked an average of eight hours a day every weekday for the past month. Is the work I'm doing perfect? No. Have I found out what I want to do in life? No. But I'm no longer sitting around waiting for some magical total salvation.1
Despite how much I'm working, I now have so much more free time. I've redeemed between between two and four hours each day that I used to spend lying on the futon, staring at the ceiling, over-analyzing my life. I now use this extra time to reach out to my friends, even friends I haven't seen in months. I see people nearly every day now, whereas before, I socialized in person about five hours a week.
Ironically, cognitive therapy has caused a new problem in the form of change stress. I've had to limit the frequency of my therapy sessions, because of how overwhelmed I've become. For example, I'm considering buying a condo, and there's a stack of paperwork sitting on my table that I know is going to be a challenge to fill out given how patchy my work-situation has been in the past couple years. But I know I can get through it. I believe in cognitive therapy. And I believe that the changes this past month haven't been a fluke.
Out of all the things I've ever tried, cognitive therapy may just be the one thing that sticks.2
1 I temporarily re-opened my software consulting business and the initial projects started out boring. But instead of moving backwards and quitting, like I had done in the past, I tried a slightly different position at a larger software company. And when that bored me, I tried something else. That's what made the real difference: my newfound resilience.
2 Cognitive therapy has stuck with me, and since then I have not had any extended period of non-work. Cognitive therapy has been the one of the single largest contributing factors to my happiness.
