I had an interesting session with my shrink yesterday. In the four years (off and on, give or take) I've been seeing her, we've done a lot of the heavy lifting towards self-actualization, leaving room to focus on some "problems"* that are really luxurious in nature: you know, the philosophical biggies like "why am I here?" and "how can I best use my talents to help others?" rather than "how can I keep myself from sticking my head in this oven and making the rest of my family's lives a living hell on earth?".

So...why am I here? And what the hell should I do with my life, or what's left of it?

The truth is, while over the years I've become a passable copywriter, a decent actress, a fairly good designer and made money at all of them, nothing** has proved as rewarding as writing this stupid blog.

Not financially, of course: you make a helluva lot more jack shilling for General Mills and Toyota than spewing random meanderings. But occasionally, I'll get a comment or an email or even a face-to-face exchange where someone actually thanks me for what I've written and/or says it's helped them in some way and boy, howdy, let me tell you, that shit is better than the finest sipping whiskey. It's the feeling of plugging in to the universe, the all-that-is, the matrix/collective-unconscious/what-the-bleep pool of love that epiphanies, Singular Glorious Moments and holding fresh babies are born of.

That, along with my recent shrink-rap, have gotten me thinking: maybe I'm just supposed to share. Maybe the reason I went through hell and made it through to the other side was to show other people how they could get there, only without the hell part. Or if they're in the hell part, maybe I could help them see the gently air-cooled room at the other end of it.

I'm planning to spend the next few months really focusing on what it is I'm "supposed" to do, and my winter holiday jumpstarting the process by reading Is Your Genius At Work?***, a book I found via Dave Pollard's excellent How To Save The World.

In the meantime, I signed up for a lens at Squidoo, Seth Godin's new social bookmarking/aggregating/web-2.0-ing venture where, as they say, everyone is an expert at something. I maybe would shun the term "expert", but I know a fair bit about happiness, specifically, the kind you're not born with. (I've met those people; I marvel over them.)

Anyway, I know that a lot of the people who come here do so for the random meanderings or the reviews or the pissy rants about stupid Vegas and stupid online daters and stupid Hollywood horse-pokey. And that's okay, because I dig writing that stuff, too. Hey, I'm a generalist!

So rather than suck all the fun out of communicatrix-dot-com, I figured I'd continue to post all the wacky things that make me, well, me, but occasionally, do a more of a how-to entry that I can link to (Squidoo is more of a pointing device than a place for long-winded diatribes...er, lessons.) We'll see how it goes. I'm actually a big fan of the oblique method of nudging, kind of a wax-on, wax-off approach rather than the three-steps-to-kicking-ultimate-ass way we like here in the U.S. But maybe it'll be a good exercise for me to help clarify some of my own thinking on what's necessary to get to happy (or tequila-mastery, or whatever else I decide I'm an 'expert' at).

xxx c

*Please understand, I am fully aware of what a luxury it is to have the time and money and lack of immediate food/shelter/clothing worries to see a shrink at all. I'm painfully aware of the below-subsistence life that so many on the planet are forced to live right this second, and for the foreseeable future. I'm just trying to leverage the good that I have into something better for everyone. Namaste, and all that.

**With the possible exception of the writing and performing of #1 & #2, my collaborative piece on illness as the road to wellness. The #1 refers to my writing partner's interstitual cystitis; the #2 stands for my Crohn's. Or poop, if you prefer.

***The author uses the word "genius" to define that exact particular thing that you and only you are good, nay, the best, at. Not genius. I am not a genius. Believe me, I only wish I were a genius.

Images via kunstradio. Danke schoen!

TAGS: Squidoo, Seth+Godin, happiness, How+to+Get+to+Happy, communicatrix