THE SWARMITE’S HOMOVISION REHAB: HAPPINESS

“You don’t know the meaning of true happiness until you have heard 30,000 gays recognize the opening bars of Dancing Queen” – so said a straight journalist writing for the London Evening Standard attending The 1st Gay Games opening ceremony in Amsterdam 1998. So this week at HOMOVISION REHAB the Swarmite delves into what makes you smile.

Like poverty happiness is relative, so create your own scale. I used to think that a bottle of poppers up my nose was intimacy & true happiness until I found other drugs up the ladder. Now drug free for a few decades and then some, HAPPINESS is whatever I choose it to be, so freedom to cock things up without beating myself up afterwards, freedom to make clearer choices and waking up on clean sheets without a hangover makes me happy. Small things count.

They say that RESENTMENT kills the container it’s kept in and my fuselage was well corroded when I was bang at it all those years ago, counting all the things I did for people and the people that gave nothing back. I remembered them. The whole of my life was conditional and conditional anything breeds disappointment and unhappiness. These days I try to avoid projection of happiness. Is this how you think?: “I will be happy WHEN I get a new job, flatmate, boyfriend and great tits.”

Everything is temporary, once you get that notion and accept that happiness can’t be captured, freedom arrives as quickly as a dealers taxi.

For freedom is intrinsically linked to happiness, ask anyone who is OUT. Freedom to be who you are, to be authentic without editing is not automatic for gayers but to aim in this direction is a happy pointer. Ask yourself exactly how OUT are you? Are you fully out at work? Do you edit when you go to family gatherings or reel off endless tales about your lifestyle, like our hetro mates. We know of some latins in particular who are inclined to tell family that they manage restaurants when in reality they manage large uncut 24/7, INCALLS. Appropriate sharing of info is different from lying through the back teeth for fear of judgement and being a chronic people pleaser all the time is hard work and when you do it breeds resentment, which is where we came in.

Losing resentments is a key to Happiness. Thinking about all the relationship betrayals, poor me’s, pour me another drink is counter productive. What works to anyone’s advantage is to write down 5 resentments about past or present and be prepared to drop the hurts that burn inside. Chem use is like the film “The Great Escape” when used to forget, to numb or to avoid rejection. Drink and drugs are great tools to employ relaxation, release and realizations, long may that continue, but not so hot when the returning resentments capture your happiness and take you back to prison camp. I heard someone say that I drank to drown my sorrows then my sorrows learnt to swim. Well it was true in my case.

Ironically, one of the happiest periods for me was 1994-96 just before the arrival of combos. I worked soley with people dying from AIDS, all with CD4’s below 10. I took one guy to Turkey with a CD4 of 2, he was determined to have a holiday before he died. He was so happy to have made it (and he lasted another 3 years with combos). Another wanted to be wheeled in a wheelchair to see David Hockney’s Mr & Mrs Ossie Clark & Percy at the Tate Gallery for the last time, while another decided to die on crisp white French linen so off we went to Peter Jones. Humour in times of darkness is a breeder of joy. With these guys I assisted them to complete their life, releasing resentments before they passed into light but anyone can lift the luggage they hold without the threat of death though I do accept that fear is a great motivator for many. Happiness is a pile of freshly ironed and folded shirts. Happiness is knowing that you have cleared the wreckage of the past. Happiness is turning the phone off. Happiness is being silent in a man’s arms. Write your own list each day as an antidote to losing the plot.

Running your life with a new set of rules fuels happy thinking. You can get this through therapy, coaching or flicking through inspirational or self-help books, however deciding not to bother with the exercises mentioned is likely to result in a half-measured result. In REHABS like the Priory for a 6 week period you do 16 hours a day of individual writing, group sessions, one 2 one counseling and emotional management including the suggestion to LET GO OF CONTROL. Recovery is hard work but worth it. Just think about how your sense of happiness is determined by the behavior of other people. Learning to detach from fixing others, pleasing others and then fixing and pleasing yourself is perhaps the ultimate shift in contentment. David Weeks scientific study, the first on the subject of eccentrics, found them to be the happiest people and they live longer purely because they gave up taking notice of what people thought of them.

Happy people are happy from within, not unhappy to be without A&F. So gayers, remember that you don’t have to be a muscle mary to workout from the inside and once you start to focus on solutions you will realize that great tits are not the key to a great life, they are simply a bonus for someone to suck on. Happiness, like poverty is relative. Now suck those tits. Ah! Happiness.

More happy info and a different blog catalogue can be found at http://www.theswarmite.com