What happiness is not
Hi sweethearts,
today a blogpost about happiness, again! I'm starting with a confession...
I myself am a googler. I google everything. So, I also googled what happiness actually is. I want to learn more about this subject and find out other opinions. To be honest, I google everything… For example I googled ‘how to get over your ex”, I googled "how to find love", I searched for "how to like yourself" etc… Guilty and not ashamed!
I just like to do my research and find out more about myself. I want to educate myself, in order to find decent arguments.
Happiness to me is a feeling of being grateful about my personal life. it really is a feeling. You don’t need to smile for it all the time though. Happiness is not smiling all the time… Happiness comes when you feel passionate about yourself and your life. It doesn’t have to mean that you fully love yourself. I still don’t love myself and probably never will. I do like myself, and that’s quite a step forward to me because I never even liked who I was before.
Happiness also means that you can dream about who or what you want to become. You don’t have to be it already. It’s about the process.
So now that you know what happiness means to me, I’ll share with you guys what happiness is not (to me). I think that it’s better to know what it is not, than to know what it is. When you know what it is not, it can be easier to create a definition about happiness for yourself.
So happiness:
- Is not being rich or wealthy. It isn’t about what you have or don’t have. This is pretty obvious. You don’t need to have much materialistic stuff, in order to be happy. But I want to nuance this; when you are wealthy you have more sources to do more fun things. Happiness to me also depends on what memories you have in your life. I think with more money, you can do more stuff so probably you can have more fun memories. BUT if you don’t have much money, you can get creative to work on doing things that are fun too.
Staycations for example. You fill your vacation with lots of fun activities, without traveling. These activities will help you to have great memories too… Consuming time the right way is essential. Boredom often leads to trouble, I always say.
- Is not being happy, funny and smiling all the time. Because, like I said before… Happiness is an generalised feeling. It doesn’t change daily. You can cry each day because you feel a lot of emotions (also the bad ones) but you still can be happy. This is actually totally how I am. I can cry over so many things that I don’t like or that I even regret but this doesn’t mean that I’m not overall happy. I am. I am happy.
Also, it’s still such a weird thing for me to speak out that I’m happy. It’s a bit uncomfortable for me because I don’t want to sound egocentric or arrogant.
- Is not being in love or experiencing love in your life. You don’t need to feel loved by others in order to be happy. You happiness can’t depend on someone else. What I also believe is that the feeling of love is a different feeling than happiness.
It can make you happy to share your love with others but I wouldn’t necessarily call it happiness. Happiness is feeling happy about your life. Not your love. Love can't totally define you.
- Is not self-love. But self-love can be a start though… I don’t love myself, as said before but I do like myself so that’s why I said that “it can be a start”.
You don’t need to be loving yourself, in order to be happy. Happiness is more than that. It’s not only about how you feel about yourself. I said before that it’s a more generalised feeling. It’s about liking yourself but more about the bigger picture. You need to be happy about your whole life. It’s the overall feeling. It’s not about self-love only.
-Is not easy. Happiness means a lot of hard work and it’s about digging deep into yourself. It means doing a lot of self-reflection and thinking about each aspect of your life. I don’t want to bring you guys down but it’s really working hard. I work on myself daily and thing about what I’m doing all the time. Each night, before going to sleep, I reflect about my day and what I needed to do differently. It can make me feel a bit insecure but I now know that I need to do it.
If you don’t like who you are, then just simply change that. It’s so easy to change yourself. I’m not saying that you need to change your whole personality… just adjust the things that you don’t like about yourself.
Find out first what you don’t like and why you don’t like this… When you know that, you’re able to do research and take steps forward into changing it. The fact that I’m just even trying this, is also making me happy. “Life’s a climb, but the view’s great”. A total cliché to end with, but it’s just the truth.
So, was this blog helpful for you sweeties? Will you take steps into changing yourself?
It’s a lot of work but it’s worth it. You will never regret working on yourself into becoming a better person.
Thanks for reading this blog!
X Steph