I am worthy and deserving of a lifetime filled with happiness and joy.

A lifetime is a long unit — long enough to contain years you would not choose again. Not every year in it arrives easy, and none of them is a stretch you have to earn your way out of before you qualify.

People tend to grant themselves this backwards and withhold it in the present. Looking at yourself at twenty-six, you'd say: of course she deserved to be happy, she was doing her best with what she had at the time.

The same sentence is true today. It's only harder to say about somebody you can see this closely.