Happiness is tricky. With a massively growing population seeking or selling happiness I felt the need to share another take.
I am living in an abundance of peace. I feel an abundance of joy, success, and (dare I say) happiness in the three main pillars of life (health, wealth, and relationships). That word ‘happiness’ though. It is such a fluid and personal term.
When I embrace people that I haven’t seen in a long time I get a common comment. A variation of ‘wow you seem so much happier than I’ve ever seen you’ or ‘you have a glow and a spark within you’ that maybe they hadn’t seen before. Or even, ‘you have found happiness and you are so deserving. I am so happy for you.’ Now, please don’t get me wrong, I am always filled with warm reassurance when and pride when someone says this. Mostly because I do/have done A LOT of self-work, research, analysis, etc. I have spent years building this life and inviting only the purest souls into my space. I really pour my entire soul into my work. Even so, that little statement ‘you found happiness’ doesn’t sit right.
Why? Well, it isn’t because I haven’t “revived, found, or discovered” happiness. All those things seem to ring true. It is because the road to happiness isn’t the whole journey and happiness isn’t the end of that journey. In fact, quite the opposite. My discovery shows that happiness is in fact one of the first pivotal steps in building a bridge to get from where you are to where you want to be.
During my greatest earth-shattering experience, I was coming out of a marriage that I thought would last forever. I had a newborn and a toddler to look after during a time that I wasn’t even sure how I was going to make it through the day. I would spend my days working but still couldn’t provide enough food to feed us. I would spend my nights crying silently, not to wake the sleeping angels on either side of me. I would stare at them and think “how are we ever going to make it?” and “this isn’t how it was supposed to be.” Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful my kids were not in the dangerous environment that was cultivating under the roof I once called home but man it was scary, lonely, and stressful trying to do it alone.
Then one day I was ready. I was done suffering. I was ready to build my bridge. So where did I start? The VERY first thing I did was wipe the fantasy future from my mind I had created. I was so sad and scared. Smiling felt like it took every ounce of my body. Every shred of energy was spent trying to compensate for the ‘normalcy’ that was stripped from my son and that my daughter would never know. Then I decided that enough was enough! I knew I couldn’t be two healthy, happy people. Or provide the masculinity my son would eventually long for, but I was damn sure going to show up as the best version of me I could.
That bridge to be built looked so daunting. How could I possibly get from here all the way over there? I STARTED with HAPPINESS. I started a log on my phone, that is still there to this day. Every time I genuinely smiled or felt that foreign feeling of joy I would right down what I was doing.
This helped me establish a base. At first the things that brought me joy were dance parties in the kitchen while I cook dinner for my precious little humans, taking them to the park, seeing them smile. All great things, no question. About 6 weeks in I was going through a drive-thru on lunch and did what I had done my entire adult life. I greeted and smiled at the person at the window. He looked up and stared for a second. Then he said to me “wow, you have the most beautiful and genuine smile. People smile all the time but yours FEELS real.” That moment was pivotal for me. I realized “it’s working!” because in that moment I was happy. I felt pure joy. I was doing something extremely average and mundane, but I found joy in all the things around me. I wondered how many times people could tell how forced or ingenuine my smiles were for years. I also realized in that moment just how long it had been since I felt so free, at peace, and joyful. YEARS… long before my life, as I saw it, came to a crashing halt.
This was a pivotal moment in acceptance of the past and excitement for the future and it all started with a choice. Not to “find” happy but to rewire my conscious and subconscious mind to SEE happiness again and use it as building blocks to the wonderful life I have been led to today.
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