Revelations on the perfect life

A perfect life?

I went into intensive therapy several years ago when my life began to unravel, and I was drowning in depression and anxiety. I am no longer in intensive therapy, having graduated to occasional visits. I say this because it is important for people to know that there is help, we can change, and it can get better. Yesterday I told the therapist – a remarkably direct and tough-minded woman who led me back from the abyss – that people were always telling me that I had the perfect life, and I never quite knew how to respond, other than to keep saying nobody’s life is or should be considered perfect.

“Jon,” she said, looking directly at me in that forceful way she has. “You do have a wonderful life. It is, in some ways, a perfect life.” This shocked me to the core. In the world I grew up in, if you said an optimistic thing, people started spitting and throwing salt over their shoulders. To say one has a perfect life seems nearly blasphemous to me, a direct invitation for lightning to come right down out of the sky and hit you on the head.

I have many of the same troubles other people have – worries about life, money, family, work. But my therapist was correct. I do have a wonderful life. I have a partner that I adore and who shares my life with me. I have work that I love. I have a farm that roots my soul, and wonderful dogs and endearing donkeys. I am making the best new friends one can imagine. My photography has erupted as a great passion in my life.

She said it was okay to acknowledge this. That lightning wouldn’t strike me. Of course, she said, you do not have a perfect life. There is no such thing. But you have a wonderful life, and it is perfectly fine to acknowledge that and simply say yes, my life is wonderful and I appreciate it.

Quite a different way to think.