What does that word mean to you? Is it simple for you, or very complex? Is it familiar for you, or very foreign?
I want you to think about it for a second.
To me, this word has a color. A feeling. It is lighthearted. Free. Open. And most of all... Yellow.
It feels like sunflowers look. It is the warm sun beating down on your skin; you close your eyes and for a moment everything is okay. For a moment. Meaning, it doesn't last. Nothing does. And this is the problem with today's society. We chase and obsess over this word as if it is the end all goal, the unattainable perfect emotion that if we get there... We have somehow won at this game called life. But that is what I like about it. It is there, and everywhere, always. You just have to let yourself feel it and let yourself accept it when it is yours, most importantly.
Happiness looks different to everyone. Which is also extremely beautiful to me. It moves with the wind. At any moment one can be happy, and just like that, it changes. There are words synonymous to 'happy'. Words that are the cousin to it. Words I feel like describe the feeling equally well. Content. Whole. Peace. These are also emotions we feel when, if again only for a moment, we are not stressed, not worried, not hurting. We just feel GOOD. Everything in our life is not perfect, things are not put together, we may be lost, but we understand life is all about the ups and down, and also more realistically, life is all about perception. Your neighbor has less than you, so why are they so damn cheery all the time? Don't they understand they are poor, with ragged clothes and the paint chipped on their house? Why do they smile so much?
"Happy" cannot be this great big achievement, this place that once we get to we can just stop there. Kind of like "I've made it, I am finally happy". Because... it exists here and now. Happy is here. Right there. People constantly overlook it. To most people, it is a faraway emotion, a feeling they can never seem to grasp or achieve. You do not have to be on your dream vacation in Hawaii to be happy. It can look like sitting in your backyard, iced tea in hand, birds singing, children playing, dinner cooking. It can look like a million things. Why are you waiting to feel it? For another time in the future? Doesn't that feel like a waste of time? What if you never make it to Hawaii? Does that also mean you will never be happy?
You don't need to lose 40 lbs. to get to happy. It took me a long time to learn this lesson and understand this concept. You will lose the lbs. only after you accept yourself as is and find yourself able to be truly happy with your outer shell. As it is now. Happiness should not come only after you've affirmed hateful comments toward yourself. It should not come only after you have shed the weight. Instead you can be happy you have a functioning body at all. Do you know what I mean? Your body is a gift and so is your ability to do all of the things you can do. Despite the number on the scale. Something I wrote a year ago when I struggling the hardest with body image issues, "Your body is not something to get angry with or despise. Think of everywhere it has taken you; every mountain it has taken you to the top of, every walk along the beach. Your body has been through so much with you. So just as you love your mind, and you must, love your body, too. It already loves you."
It is also not a contest. We should celebrate any and everybody's happiness when it comes to them. When they are. You can truly read it on people's faces, feel it in their energy, read it in their eyes. You can also see the way a person carries themselves, and the way they treat others. You know a happy person when you see one. They don't have a lot of things to prove. Happy wears well on everyone. A smile. A peaceful person. But just because it does not come as easily to you, does not mean you should desire to take anybody's happiness away from them. Let them live it.
One snowy February night in 2014, I was outside talking to one of my neighbors. My mom had just lost her battle with cancer a week earlier. I don't remember what me and this neighbor were talking about, but apparently I was being my normal, cheerful self despite my world falling apart. Another neighbor from across the street, approached us and asked me very starkly, "How are you smiling right now?" I will never forget that interaction. She was surprised that I was smiling because my mom had just passed away. As if I didn't have a right to be doing that. As if she expected me to be hysterically crying at every given moment. As if I'm not the type of person to naturally find a silver lining in every situation. If you know me, you know this is how I have handled most of my pain. I have found a reason, a lesson, anything to make light of a dark situation. Because to me, I do not believe in the alternative. Of course I was incomprehensibly heartbroken. But the pain can eat you alive, take you down, cloud your vision. I did not want to let it; again. I had been there before.
This question, from mostly a complete stranger, will live with me forever. I definitely felt guilty immediately after she said this as if Happy would never be allowed in my world since my mom was now gone. That is such a poisonous mindset; one I had worked tirelessly to walk away from. To this day, I am much older now, after three years, I cannot believe a grown woman would ask a child something like that. However, I have realized this: People always want to police other people's joy.
"Birds sing after a storm, why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?"
- Rose Fitzergald Kennedy
I am one of those people that never understood happiness existed all around me. I thought only in certain scenarios could it exist. I thought that it only lived inside puppies and that dogs were happiness incarnate (which they are, but that's beside the point). I didn't think it could live with me every day and be with me all the time. I have struggled with anxiety and depression since I was eight years old. I have experienced dark nights that I didn't think I'd live through. I never thought happiness would be "mine". I didn't think it could ever belong to me; that it was everyone else's emotion to feel. They were so fortunate: They had the one thing every single person wants.
To be happy.
I hated when people always said to me, "happiness is a choice". My mind would growl, "I have depression, dude," and I'd just roll my eyes. The thing is, I believe that now. While still living every day with mental illness. Because it doesn't have anything to do with my demons. It is about my ability to fight them and win. To feel happy even in the times when I am so depressed everything is foggy. Nights when I wish it would all just end. I wake up in the morning and try again. Happy. I am. I can feel it in my bones. That is another thing; I didn't think I deserved to be happy. It was absolutely foreign to me. Living life pretending, and as soon as I was alone, letting myself feel really dark and lonely. It does not have to be this way. You deserve Happy. We all do. It is all of ours to feel. Every day. Whenever we want. You have that right. Love yourself. Be Happy.
That is not to take away from how difficult I know it is. I know this firsthand. I have been the zombie who walked through life on auto-pilot. Hoping and praying that maybe one day I can feel happy again, like I did when I was a kid and the world was brand new. My anti-depressants just made every day life feel numb, not good, not bad, just nothingness. I have gotten to this place completely on my own. After loss, grief, heartbreak, self loathing, all of it. I owned these things, took them to bed with me at night. I am familiar to the darkness. But I can say with ease now I am also familiar to the light. And I want you to know how good it feels. It feels damn good to finally be here after twenty years of hating myself, the world, thinking everything was out to get me. Instead, now I am in control. Happiness can be mine because I welcome it lovingly, with open arms. "There you are... I am honored to finally meet you. And I know you are here to stay."
And I hope that you understand that you deserve to know happiness. You are worthy of it. Experiencing its warmth. You have no idea how much happy wants to be accepted by you. I used to think that happy and I would never meet or better yet know how to get along. But I want you to choose it.
One of my favorite quotes in the world is, "If you want to find happiness, find gratitude." It is important that people understand this. There is no perfect recipe for life. You may think as you scroll through your feed on social media that the people who have "more" than you are somehow the lucky ones; you know, the people favored by God, who have the cookie cutter lives you've been striving for your whole life. They've done it, they've arrived at happy. Now you are frustrated you can never seem to get there. That's the thing, though, you already have.
What I may be able to tell you is this, those people might find gratitude more often than you.
That is the only thing they have "more" of.
A sure way to "find" happy is this: Find gratitude in your every day life. Wake up every day and be utterly grateful for what you do have. Happiness does not come once you've collected more things, more money, more relationships, more vacations, more anything. Happiness comes as soon as you stop looking for it and realize it is already there.
With love,
Izzy