In spring 2007, about a year after my most recent hospital stint, I found myself sinking into my annual Springtime Depression. (I know, most people get it during the Winter, but I’m one of those freaks whose depression is triggered when everything is rejuvenated. Go figure.) Instead of hiding away into my usual practices and wasting what was easily the best year I’d had in college (with the exception of my semester abroad), I went on a Pronoiac rampage, inspired by Rob Breszny’s ‘Pronoia: the Antidote for Paranoia’.

I spent a whole weekend printing out individual mini-posters with pronoiac, inspiring factoids (like “After an accident that left him paralyzed from the nose down, Jean Dominique Bauby dictated his entire award-winning memoir to his wife by blinking his left eye.” and “Because there is no machine gentle enough to handle them, every strawberry you have ever eaten was picked by hand.”), running over 500 copies of them, and plastering the walls of my university’s academic buildings with them. (Without authoritative consent, which angered a lot of people, apparently.) I posted them on behalf of the “Laboratory for Truth and Beauty” (Breszny gives his readers permission to do this.) I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing except my relatively new boyfriend (to-be babydaddy) who rolled his eyes and smiled at my tendency toward the slightly insane.

It was cool to see people’s reactions, even though the majority of the population had no idea how to process the idea that someone (or a group of someones) would take the time to just post notes of happiness for the simple, innocent purpose of spreading love or joy. I’d say that it was strange that some people were even angry about them, but this is something one can just expect in a Fear-based society such as ours, I guess. My favorite moments came when, in one of my classes, my professor mentioned the signs and started a class discussion in which many of my classmates and friends expressed gratitude for having something to amuse them and break the redundant stress of the approaching exam season in addition to the heartbreaking aftermath of the V.Tech shooting.

When my then-boyfriend told me that the student newspaper was going to run a story about the strange presence of the Truth and Beauty Lab, I decided to drop my ruse for a moment and reveal myself to the newspaper’s editors (who were/are pretty good friends of mine, thankfully) in hopes of possibly speaking on behalf of the T&B Lab to explain my motives anonymously. (The BEST reaction came from my friend Fish, who laughed, “I knew it had to be someone cool.”) I still have the newspaper in my folder of personal achievements.

Anyway, immediately following this was when my life really began to be kicked into high gear. That semester I finished with my highest GPA ever, I was praised heavily by the guest author who taught the fiction workshop as having the “blue ribbon story of the year”, and then there was the whole baby-engagement-moving in with Greg thing that made me happier than I had been in yeeeaars.

Now, I’m not one of those people who swears by ‘The Secret’ or anything and, actually, I was pretty disgusted with the book as it seemed to advocate a positive attitude for the exclusive purpose of acquiring monetary success, which I think is a bit misguided. However, in retrospect it seems kind of reasonable that my sharing of a positive attitude was responsible for the massive return of love and blessings I received in the aftermath. No, I don’t think that plastering a few hundred flyers around a campus is what changed my entire life, but I certainly believe that this random act of love and joy attracted more love and joy into my own reality.

So, even though I’ve been sitting around focusing on my own personal life and working to propel my family’s future forward, maybe I should start allotting some time to reach out and be kind on an anonymous level again. Not necessarily to bring myself more happiness in my life (because the happiness I’ve found in the last couple years certainly hasn’t been easy by any means) but because I believe joy and love has to be perpetuated by everyone at all times on a grassroots level or it simply cannot exist. And to not work toward that is being extremely hypocritical of me, I think. Especially if I’m sitting around expecting other people to somehow do it for me.

It’s time to shake things up again, I think. I’m going to be brainstorming pronoiac mischief but I won’t be posting my actions… that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?