What happens when we get sad? Often, we find ourselves in a rut. When we sink into a state of melancholy, too often, we develop habits of cycling though mediocre days that eventually become our new state of normal. The longer we exist here for, the harder it is to break free from. We convince ourselves that change is too challenging, and the fear of failure is too tremendously weighing to attempt anything new. We convince ourselves that we are content. Far too often, we convince ourselves that we don’t want anything to be different; that our state of numbness is what we desire as we melt further and further into meaninglessness.

For me, this looked like spending all my free time in bed. I would watch YouTube for hours on end and I would often see five or six A.M. Before I finally dozed off. My diet was family-sized chip bags and ample amounts of dip as I did not have the energy to make or find anything of substance to consume. I was working a part-time job I wasn’t fond of and with the small amount of change I was making, I wasn’t able to afford anything I wished for, let alone the regular bills and money I already owed just to fundamentally survive. I was recently out of an unhealthy and wildly emotionally abusive relationship and long after it was over, fear, dread, guilt, and shame consumed me. Over the years before, I had undergone several accounts of horrific sexual abuse and I hadn’t yet had the tools to make peace with the terror. I had made irreversible, regrettable mistakes that weighed heavy on my conscience, as I had allowed myself to devolve to a point where I wasn’t equipped to stand up for what was just and good. I found myself broken, lost, and defeated and my bedroom filled quickly with empty Miss Vickie’s chip bags, Dr. Pepper bottles, and Philadelphia chip dips. For a long while, I only knew exhaustion and grief.

I have always believed that a relationship shouldn’t be a source of happiness and instead, an extension of it. It has always been my understanding that finding happiness for ourselves first is the best course of action and that a partner should add more to what you’ve already built for yourself and not be the thing you build off of. With that understanding, I have always been comfortable and content when I have been single. However, after getting out of the painful and terrifying relationship I had just been in, I started to believe I might be better off if I remained single for the rest of my days. I knew already that I was capable of being happy without a love interest by my side, and I started to see more clearly the rarity of true love. I started to believe that the chances of me stumbling into a love profound like the one my sister had found with her boyfriend were incredibly slim, and I figured that according to the laws of probability, there was a significant chance that I would never find something like that for myself. With my sister especially, I knew that I would always have some form of love in my life and I knew that if I lived through life unable to find more, I wouldn’t need it, so long as I had at least her by my side. While I still believe in the fundamentals; that happiness stems from within, my mindset then became concretely that I was destined to be without a solid relationship built off genuine and true love and I began planning and dreaming about my future as it might play out on the basis that I would live it out alone. I completely stopped considering an alternative. I was entirely convinced that my future home would only have one occupant and any decision that needed to be made to carve the path ahead for myself would only ever have to be bounced off and chosen by me.

I didn’t have the energy for anything. Social interaction became tremendously difficult for me to upkeep. I had almost always been bad at replying to messages right away, but this habit worsened greatly as unopened messages accumulated in my phone, some of them, months old. I couldn’t bring myself to open up a conversation thread and answer, “what have you been up to lately?” Most frustratingly, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t find the motivation to reply back. I would tell myself that I would ‘in a minute’ or ‘just after I do this’ and then that time would come and pass, and so would the next, and the one after that. Unintentionally, and against what I wanted, I let connections slip. I let people I cared so dearly for drift away from me simply because I couldn’t find the energy to write, “not a whole lot! What’s been going on with you?” There are still so many people I wish I could have maintained a solid bond with, and that is a consequence I suffer from when I was broken.

All my life, I have been a big dreamer and the idea of who I want to be has always been ambitious inside my mind. When I didn’t have the energy to become the dream, I developed a habit of saying “I will.” I meant it every time I said it, but I was the last person to continue to believe it. They become empty words for anyone else. Years ago, I started a YouTube channel. I enjoyed it immeasurably and it was a near-perfect creative outlet for myself. I became frustrated with being unable to produce the quality I desired and over time, my regular posts dwindled to a stop. I always intended to go back to it, for I continued to remember how wonderful the process made me feel, but the further I developed into my broken state, the less able I became to follow through with my plans. My parents knew how much I enjoyed my YouTube journey, and when they saw me becoming defeated, they turned a room in our house into a studio for me to create the kinds of videos I had been longing to. It was their (incredible) way of trying to motivate me to find myself again. The room was gutted, repainted, refurnished, and perfected, and after all was said and done, I continued to say, “I will.”

My piano keys became dusty, my notebooks were left half-filled, my swing set only moved when it got caught in a gust of wind. When people tried to make plans with me, I would give them a vague frame of time and I would promise only, “maybe.” When the time came, I would find an excuse to get out, or worse, I would let the time slip by and deliver a half-baked apology a week or two later. My bedsheets filled with crumbs and when I finally found the energy to brush my hair, I would spend an hour untangling the mats that had formed at the base of my neck. Pajamas became my wardrobe, and the most exciting thing that happened to me was when I bought a six-foot charging cord for my phone, so I didn’t have to worry about it dying when I was on my tenth hour of consuming content from Grace Helbig, Cody Ko, or Anna Akana.

“I will.”

I meant to. What went on inside my head didn’t reflect the way I lived my life. My mom was right; I needed to find a new job. I was unwilling to pick up more shifts at my current job and I claimed that it was because I wasn’t fond enough of the work to have the motivation to return there more frequently throughout the week, but the truth was I simply didn’t have the energy. I convinced myself that working more hours would be sacrificing my abundant free time, but I wasn’t using my free time efficiently as it was. I just intended to. The true root of my hesitation to work more hours was that I feared it was too much for me to take on in my current state. I already didn’t have the drive for the things I wanted to do, and I was on the verge of entirely giving up altogether, so I worried that spending more time doing something I didn’t want to do would be the thing that pushed me over the edge. A future of missing enough work to get fired and then feeling too defeated to find another job, thus multiplying my debt and losing my ability to pay for things like my phone and my car wasn’t exactly out of reach. So, I continued to make excuses to avoid picking up more shifts. I wasn’t happy at my job, and my mom was right; I should find something new. I had a resume made up, but I didn’t send it out. The uncertainty I had about entering a new field mixed with the lack of belief I had in myself resulted in me believing I would be incapable of anything else. I doubted my intelligence and my skills, and my memories would spiral through every critique ever given to me by any employer and I began to believe that I wasn’t cut out to excel or succeed. I worried about not making it through the three-month probational period down any avenue of work and I worried about how the failure might torment me further and in turn, make me less able to do well at the next job I tried for. Worry kept my resume in the drafts of my email and it kept me at my part-time job that was void of joy.

I meant to. Ideas for new YouTube videos accumulated in my head and I would jot them down in the notes section of my phone, promising myself that I would complete them once I had the means and the energy. More than a dozen ideas found their resting place in my notes. I missed making music and I promised myself countless times that I would wander to my piano after one more video. I missed the freedom I felt on my swing set, but I told myself I should wait for better weather. I created stories and wrote lyrics in my head, and I would decide that I would put them in my notebook tomorrow as I had found perfect comfort I didn’t wish to disturb in my bed. I would start taking lessons for music or activity… once I had the money.

I was accused of being lazy and not caring, but that was far from the truth. All my life, I have been a big dreamer and the idea of who I want to be has always been ambitious inside of my mind. I continued to care endlessly about the people I avoided replying to and about the dreams I longed to explore, but my broken heart and my empty soul disconnected the ambition before execution. As deeply as the belief that I was content was rooted, the small voice that told me what I wanted, still spoke to me. I wasn’t ever lazy; I was just unable to create the energy to do any of the things the small voice said I should. In fact, most of the energy I did have was expended through the vibrations of that small voice’s frustrations. I would become angry with myself for not moving forward with the things I dreamed about as I laid in bed, and that anger was enough to deplete my energy before I could ever begin a task. Despite my sorrow, my worry, my grief, and my excuses, somewhere deep down, desire always existed inside of me. The problem was only that I had trapped myself in a funnel of despair, and the longer I settled in, the more difficult it was to climb out. Looking back now, if I didn’t break free from it when I did, I’m not sure I would have ever been able to. Every bit longer I stayed there made the next day sink into it a lot further than the last.

So, how did I break out?

In Practice Being Happy, I spoke a little about creating variety in your day, and today, I want to expand on it.

Throughout the course of my life, I have discovered two things: first, that a day feels more fulfilling when it has a multitude of events or happenings that ignite different sectors of your mind, and when it is filled with accomplishments, even if they are small, and second, that motivation works an awful lot like a snowball rolling down a hill. It starts small, but the longer it rolls, it picks up speed and its growth becomes easier as it builds. With the tiny amount of energy I had back then, I built a snowball.

My dreams then were far larger than what I was able to take on in my state, so I began with things I knew I would be able to do with the energy I had. I started with things I knew I would enjoy, and; therefore, I stood the best chance of following through.

Because song writing has always come naturally to me, and was something I developed a deep love for, I figured I could write lyrics in bed, so I began there. Finding satisfying rhyme schemes and searching for the most appropriate word to match the emotion I wished to convey sharpened and engaged my mind. I would complete a song and gift myself the satisfaction of accomplishment. For a while, this expended all the energy I had, but then the snowball grew.

I’m not great at drawing but I love to doodle, and I created enough ambition to doodle between song writing. I would have to think about what I wanted to put on the page and how I wanted it to look, and that expanded the amount of my mind I needed to use. The snowball got a little bigger.

I pulled out my makeup again. I would have to think about which colors I wanted to use and how they would compliment each other. I would have to decide on the kind of look I wanted to portray and the parts of my face I had to emphasis and it required me to use more thought. Another accomplishment, and a bigger snowball.

I would document my creations with photos, but I would bore easily of typical selfies of my face from the shoulders up, and this motivated me to create backdrops and toy with lighting and find free editors on my phone to create more out of the final project. More of my mind, more accomplishment, bigger snowball.

As the snowball grew greater, I began tackling more. I introduced activity and research into my roster. The more I did in a day, and the more variety there was in the things I chose to do, the greater my motivation grew and the closer the ambition that has always lived inside of my mind matched the ambition I executed. The more I did today, the more I would be able to do tomorrow.

If you are in a rut right now like the one I was in, I know you aren’t capable of taking on a lot. I know it is tremendously difficult for you to take on anything at all. Still, here is what I recommend:

Think about something small that you could do. Something small that you already know you enjoy. Start with just thinking about doing that thing and focus on intending to do it. I know you may not be able to do it today, and that’s okay. If you go a full day, or two, or a week thinking about it without actually doing it, don’t feel guilty about it. Guilt will hinder you from trying. Instead, keep thinking about doing it until the day comes that you actually do.

If that’s all you’re capable of doing that day, that’s okay. Do it again tomorrow, and then the next, and the next, until you’re ready to take on another small thing. If you get bored of the repetition, change gears; pick something else to do instead.

When you feel the snowball begin to grow, seize it immediately. Even before the snowball grows, plan for yourself other things you could add onto the list so that when the snowball grows large enough, you know what to do next.

When you’re ready, deviate from the ‘genre’ of things you’ve been fulfilling your day with. Try to expand your horizons by implementing things that use up more avenues of your mind.

What I mean is – think back to school. In school, our days were filled with a variety of things, each of which used up a different space of our thinking capacity. There were the core subjects: Math, Social, English, and Science. There were our optional classes, like Drama, Band, and Shop, and there was time for socialization in breaks, and early on, there was play time. Work off this same format. Start with the things you enjoy the most, as they will be the things you are most likely to complete, but as the snowball grows, start taking on things you don’t enjoy, too.

Elephants are my favorite animal. One of the things I did, for instance, was research them. I learned a lot about elephants.

I learned a lot about Scotland, as I had always been fascinated by the culture. When the snowball grew big enough, I found the time and ambition to investigate their history.

Hell, I even looked up mathematical Mad Minutes when my snowball allowed room enough to do something I’m the least interested in of all!

Discover again the value of play. Go with a few friends to a playground and be a kid again. Use your imagination wherever you can, you’ll be surprised by how much joy childlike wonder can bring to you, even as an adult.

Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect to fill each day with such a vast collection of things, and honestly, that isn’t truly the goal. The goal is to find time whenever you are capable, both in your state of mind and with the moments you have free in a day to fill with a larger variety of things. Even if it is something that takes five minutes. Emptying the dishwasher, exchanging a meaningless social media scroll with a cell phone game that requires critical thinking, or reading a short story or a blog article that can expand your horizons is enough to add to the variety. I promise you that the more you build these small habits, the easier it will become for you to tackle the things you’ve been longing to all your life. Start small, let the snowball build naturally, and take advantage of the growth as soon as it develops. If you skip a day, don’t allow yourself to skip two. Never take on more than what you can handle. Begin creating the ambition your small voice is begging for you to have.

Do this because now, I have a full-time job and working eight hour shifts five days a week no longer feels like too much take on. Now, my piano keys don’t get dusty and the spines of my notebooks are growing more fragile. Now, I have a blog and I’m excited to speak freely on the things I’m passionate about, and I’m motivated to keep adding to it. Now, I’ve posted two short stories that I wrote to completion and they’re out there for the world to read. Now, I am in love; I’m in a wonderful relationship with someone who is an addition to my happiness and has been a role model and a motivator. He began pushing my snowball down the hill with me and it has more than doubled in size since he has been at my side. Now, I know that while love is rare, it is easier to stumble upon and find a genuine source of it when your state of mind matches your dreams, and your ambition matches your little voice. Now, I am nearly whole, I believe in what I am capable of, and I’m strong enough to face challenges and stand for what is just and good.

Do this because it has only been a few years since I spent my days in bed, living off a diet of chips and dip, watching YouTube until five or six in the morning, and my broken heart and empty soul prevented me from living the life I dreamed of.