Being happy sounds so simple.
We’ve grown up learning “happy” as a common adjective to describe our mood and how we’re feeling. We are continuously finding ourselves evaluating whether we’re happy or sad, but sometimes we can lose sight of what makes us happy.
Whether it’s love, friendships, school, or work, it’s so ridiculously easy to get caught up in something else and completely forget what makes you happy. It sounds cheesy as anything, but I’ve realized in the last month or so, the only person that can truly make you happy is YOU.
I believe that you really have to lose sight of what makes you happy to end up finding it again, and I’ve experienced this first hand. Love is also a word that sounds so simple. We say we “love” so many things on a daily basis, but there is so much more to love than just feeling affectionate.
I’ve only been in love once in my entire life, and it’s the most indescribable feeling in the world. After a fourteen-month relationship and whirlwind of emotions, fights, good times, bad times, weird times, awkward times, and everything in between, our relationship came to an end.
It was hard to pinpoint where our problems were coming from, but we both knew that we couldn’t bear to keep making each other unhappy. It was mutual, because we both realized how unhappy we were, but we had been ignoring it.
Sometimes, in relationships, you get so caught up in another person that you solely depend on them for everything, but mostly for your happiness. I had completely lost sight of what made me happy and who I was.
If anyone had told me this during any part of our relationship, I would’ve brushed it off and just kept thinking at the very least, I still had my boyfriend to fall back on. It took my lowest low and the very bottom for me to realize that I wasn’t necessarily unhappy with my relationship, I was unhappy with myself.
It’s a dreadful moment that you don’t want to come to terms with, but once I did I could literally feel a weight being lifted off of my shoulders. I spent the last fourteen months neglecting relationships with friends, neglecting my own feelings, and ultimately giving my all into a relationship that wasn’t giving back to me.
I wanted to believe every piece of advice I was given in the first weeks of my heart-breaking split, but I just couldn’t with the way I felt. I was still in love with my ex-boyfriend, and that wasn’t going to change right away.
I knew time would be the best thing for me, but who is ever really excited for time to make them feel better? I would’ve paid a million dollars to speed up the clock and fast-forward any amount of time just to swallow the grieving period and never look back. Boy, am I thankful that I didn’t have a million dollars and that speeding up time isn’t a real thing.
I learned more about myself in a month than I ever had in my whole life. Happiness depends completely on you, not anyone else. If you can learn to be happy with yourself, then the rest will work itself out.
To some people, it’s a foreign thought to even have to evaluate their happiness. Throughout the deterioration of my relationship, I would always look at people I knew and wonder to myself how they’re so happy, whether they were single, going through a hard time, or just had nothing exciting going on. I was plain jealous.
I wanted to know why that couldn’t be me and why I couldn’t have it figured out, even when I felt like I had it all, boyfriend included.
Happiness surely doesn’t come easy to some, but I promise that the sooner you start searching for it within yourself, the sooner you will become the person you want to be.