The gift of discovery
You have been given the gift of discovering just how little it takes for you to be happy.
We all go through life with certain default constraints we stay within. Now, free of these, you are discovering what the ancients knew. To live happily is only to live in accordance with one's self. Not by complying with foreign dictates.
Without anyone telling you where to go and where to be, you are left alone with yourself, to understand what drives you.
Think of every thing thing that causes you pain or anxiety. It is the having of a thing that causes you the pain. The too-expensive purchase you're still paying off.
To be happy requires almost nothing. You are discovering that now. You could live quite happily with very little if you were forced too.
It's the actions of others ping-ponging off your mind that you dread. Shame, disapproval, rejection. But those things cannot co-opt your mind.
All the regimented "go here, do this" that you're free of now, you see your life as a blank page that you control. It's always been that way. You just now, for the first time in your life, are seeing it that way.
And what is it which [happiness] demands of him? The easiest thing in the world, – to live in accordance with his own nature.
But this is turned into a hard task by the general madness of mankind; we push one another to vice.
And how can a man be recalled to salvation, when he has nothing to restrain him, and all mankind to urge him on?