Life is funny

I've a confession to make: I've been a nervous wreck most of my life - at least since I was a child. So I've started this blog help other people who call themselves nervous or neurotic or just a little crazy see the funny side of life, the humor in it all. Maybe we can learn to laugh at ourselves. I know when I did, my life got better. Maybe it will help us become better people or at least enjoy life a little more.

It wasn't until I was 30 years old that I started to learn how to laugh at my nervous symptoms. And I had plenty of them! I was depressed, almost daily it seemed. Life seemed bleak, hopeless, endlessly unpleasant. I got mad, really mad, screaming mad, almost every day. Everyone and everything irritated me: bad drivers, bad traffic, rude salespeople and customer service call center employees, my friends (the few that I had), my employers and coworkers (when I had a job). I found little to be funny in life. If you told me to smile, I wanted to wipe any smile you might possess off your face. At the least, I might growl at you.

But when I was about 30 years old, my life changed. I made friends with someone who was attending a cognitive-behavioral self-help group. This program had been around for more than 60 years. Developed by a neuropsychiatrist in Chicago in the 1930s, Recovery, Incorporated (as it was known at the time) taught people suffering from nervous conditions, from simple neurosis to severe mental disorders, how to live with and manage their symptoms, including anxiety, low self-esteem, depression. It was in this program that I learned how humor can help reduce these symptoms.

So, here I am more than 10 years later, living live and trying to use humor and other techniques in the events of my daily life. I'll talk more about this later. But I just want to welcome everyone for now.

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