my liberation notes

part 1

When I wake up before my alarm and don’t have to listen to the excruciating sound of it ringing, that is 10 seconds of me feeling relief.

When I walk out to the bus station and the bus isn’t late, and I can walk in a relaxed pace to my job as a barista and as a receptionist on other days, that gives me about five to forty minutes of calm.

At work, customers come in and go out again. With every especially friendly and understanding customer, I feel about 10 seconds of happiness, even if there are customers of the bad side in-between. Sometimes the bad ones would overshadow, and their sticky shady shitty words stay with me until I get home late at night, but I am learning not to grant them that much power.

When I discover yet another book I want to read, and then I do, and it finishes strong and I end up closing the book and feeling everything at once, I make a promise to keep the book forever in my shelf. Each time I look at it, I’ll remember how satisfying it was to read it.

When I play my music on shuffle and a song comes on, associated with a specific happy memory in my head, it can take me out of any bad feeling for at least the entirety of the 3 minutes and 45 seconds of the song. It lasts longer if I let it repeat.

When I walk past a dog and it wiggles its tail or has eye contact with me on the bus or the tram, I feel happy for the entire time it’s looking at me. The same goes with babies and little kids. The other day a little girl whispered to her mother that she thought I was pretty. I grinned for seconds at each different stage of the day.

I feel over the moon for half a day when I get unexpected compliments on my perfume, my outfit, my demeanor, and my reactions, things I can and can’t really control. I equally get offended because I take a lot personally, which is a personal flaw, but the same sensitivity gives me joy when the pleasant stuff happens.

When in a full train I happen to get a seat for a 2 hour long ride, I count myself really lucky. Even luckier when the museum I am visiting doesn’t disappoint.

It’s an entire day of giddiness when I feel like I am part of something, like when I hang out with my loved ones, and they seem to be enjoying my company, thus my entire existence. I go to sleep, sometimes exhausted from staying up late, but grateful.

I try to fill my days with seconds of happiness like that, and that is why the days can go by, bearable and all.