I was one of the most miserable people I had ever known. Misery was a lifestyle for me, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. Then, after more than forty years of living in utter misery, it all suddenly changed. The best part was, it was so simple. By changing just one thing in my life, I went from a severely depressed, jobless single mom who continued to turn to drinking, to operating my own independent publishing company!

I remember the first time I tried to take my life. I ran to the bathroom crying, filled with hurt. I opened the medicine cabinet and took all the prescription pills I could find and swallowed them. I just wanted to die. I don’t even think I knew what the word suicide meant, because I was only nine years old. But I knew those pills could kill me, and I just wanted to die.

It was the first of many suicide attempts through the years. Pills, wrist-cutting, self-suffocation. Once, as a teenager, I even put a gun to my head, but my parents came home early and I threw the gun back into their nightstand and ran to my room. Starting in my twenties, I turned to alcohol. I went in and out of jobs and relationships while constantly moving. I had gone from being financially well off to being jobless, even to losing my home to foreclosure. I went from severe back pain to constantly calling in sick to breast cancer. And those were just the good times.

Then, two years ago, I finally decided to pursue my dream and become an author of psychological fiction, and I did. I poured myself into my books, which did pretty well in sales. Then one day I sat at my computer, ready to knock out my sixth book, and I didn’t want to.

I was tired, exhausted, miserable. I had worked so hard at fulfilling my dream of becoming an author, and now I was right back to my emotional bottom. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, This is it, and fell into one of my deepest depressions. I slept a lot, drank, and just felt numb. I interacted with the world as best I could but felt so removed from it at the same time. I was a single mom of two girls, and taking my life wasn’t an option. So I just struggled through life as best as I could, telling loved ones what they wanted to hear because I didn’t even understand the truth of the situation.

I had been studying and learning about the law of attraction for years, but something was missing and I couldn’t figure it out. After a few weeks, I began to give some thought to the idea that maybe being an author wasn’t what I’m supposed to do in life to make me happy. Then I said it again and again, until it narrowed down to “Make me happy, make me happy.” I thought back to the dozens of times I had watched, read, and listened to The Secret and Rhonda Byrne saying, “You have to feel good.”

Then it dawned on me. What if all I ever wanted out of everything I have been chasing was not to get the thing itself but to be happy, to feel good? What does that even mean?

I realized that I had never learned how to be happy. Sure, I had had happy moments, but happiness, no. I had been chasing it and didn’t even realize it. So it was in that moment I decided I needed to learn how to be happy, and the only one who could teach me was me.

I made a list of 10 things that really made me happy and decided to start incorporating these things in my life every day. Then life got in the way and I didn’t do them, but I still looked at my list every morning and gave thought to doing these things even if it was just in my mind.

And guess what happened? I began to feel happy. It was embracing every morning and proactively giving thought to things that personally made me happy that finally taught me my own happiness. Once I taught my mind and body how to be happy, I began to manifest more happy things, and because I felt happy, I naturally manifested more happy things into my life.

I wish I could go back and tell my nine-year-old self, “You don’t need to take those pills to make the pain go away. You can make those awful feelings go away. You just have to make a happy list and it will be okay. It will be more than okay, it will be great.” But I can’t go back. All I can do now is share my story with others and tell them that after more than forty years of misery, it all changed once I became proactive in creating my own happiness, and the law of attraction did the rest. If everything I went through was to share this message with the world, it was all worth it.

Heidi Thatcher, Founder of Penny Press Publishing — www.pennypressbooks.com