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Take That Happiness Off the Shelf
If I had a nickel for every time I told myself I’m going to put my happiness first, I would probably have about ten million piggy banks— all filled with useless change.
Why do we do that? Why do we act like our mentalities can be so easily changed? Why do we think that because we realize we are unhappy, understand that because we deserve to be happy, that suddenly happiness will get on its bike, ride on over with a newspaper, and hit us with a new headline like “Today’s the Day!” or “You Don’t Have to Worry Anymore”.
I wait for that headline all the time, and I let myself down, because at the end of the day, I put my happiness on the kind of shelf that although may be at the top, it’s so high up that I can’t reach, and so it collects dust and ages until the day I bring it down for a little while to give it a clean. But as soon as I put it back, the cycle only repeats.
Finding yourself and your identity as a teen is just the most difficult homework ever, and no one assigns it. You just find yourself feeling like something is missing, and when you look for it, you realize that is it the wisdom of how to not let the world knock you down when you are at your most vulnerable— how to not squirm when someone asks you “Who do you want to be?” or “What can you tell me about yourself?”, the latter question always getting this response out of me—
“Well…um… I like… food?”
My happiness, I realized this year, comes from me being comfortable with myself, in both any and every way.
I love it when I can stick up for myself, and I love it when I am proud of myself. I love feeling beautiful, and special, and different in the way that everyone wants to be.
School is going to standardize us, and make us feel like numbers and letters define us, and that is all that will define as those numbers and letters are major factors to college.
But I’ve come to see this year— this horrible, dreadful, devil’s year— that I like something more than just food. I like myself, actually. And I want to respect myself, and be happy in all that I am and all that I do.
Now, that may not mean a lot to people, and it might not be such an identifying moment.
But, I really think we all can benefit from not setting the goal of happiness as a goal, but making it a mentality, making it a lifestyle in the small decision to just accept ourselves, or even just to comprehend the small fact itself that we do not even need to put happiness on a shelf if we carry it around in our smiles, hearts, eyes, voices, and most importantly, in ourselves.
We may not be out there curing epidemics or saving the world because we know what we want to be and what to be, but we can definitely look inside and find something so special, so worth-while that we are happy just knowing it's there.
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I really want teens who are in the midst of a horrible freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior year to remember there is more to them than just living day to day with school work. We have to be happy, and although we have not truly found our ground yet, a good foundation to start on is accepting ourselves for all that we are and letting the prospect of happiness stop being a prospect, but a mentality.