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Choosing Happiness with the Magic Underwear Trick

posted 2nd March 2010    Written by: Nicole Antoinette    CATEGORY: All Posts, Nicole Antoinette, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 2

One of the main reasons I love personal blogs is that I’m fascinated with people’s private lives. I feel like how you act at home is the truest reflection of who you are, and I just can’t get enough of reading about other people’s lives and watching their video blogs and clicking on their Twitpics.

Which is to say, I’m Nicole and I’m a voyeur and I don’t care because it’s so fun and I just can’t help it and the internet makes it so damn easy.

You know what I love the most? The details.

Like, what do you and your husband have for dinner? Do you cuss a lot? What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Do you like hiking on the weekends? What color are your walls? And on and on.

My home life, in case you’re just as much of a voyeuristic stalker, is a combination of Trader Joe’s and writing and Snuggies and a wood burning fire place and dancing on the counter to mashup music and wearing my hair in a side ponytail and watching stand up comedy online and I don’t have a husband but my roommate and I eat a lot of pasta for dinner and of course I cuss like crazy and I listen to Bedrock by Young Money when I first wake up and sure hiking sounds fun and my walls are like a sage-ish green.

I think that things like this, the details of our lives, reveal what our values are and what’s most important to us. How we spend our personal time is what defines us, and one of the most defining things about my home life right now (and therefore my life in general), is that I spend the majority of my time at home wearing nothing but a sports bra and boy short underwear.

I know that probably sounds totally bizarre and you’re all, “Wait, what?” but here’s the thing: it’s all about building confidence.

Overall, I think this small act has less to do with being almost naked and more to do with the fact that I’m really just trying to close the gap between who I am and who I want to be, and who I want to be is a woman who’s so overwhelmingly comfortable with her own body that feeling otherwise isn’t an option.

We all do things like this, right? Things that make us feel good and emphasize the fact that even if our over-scheduled lives try to make it otherwise, happiness is something that can’t be dispensable. And I really believe that happiness, the purest happiness, is completely self-defined and that all we need to do is figure out what makes us kick and then run with it, and run hard.

Happiness is a choice. Confidence is a choice.

And lately I’ve been choosing both by jumping around my apartment in my underwear while listening to live versions of John Mayer on YouTube, making tomato sauce, and checking myself out in the mirror. That’s how I’m choosing happiness, choosing confidence…

Your turn.

photo credit: Annie Mole

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