The pursuit of happiness

The pursuit of happiness.

I feel really strongly that life should be about happiness. I feel like the goal in life should be happiness, and I have some ideas about how to make life happy.

The aspect of happiness that I want to discuss today is honesty. We all say that we appreciate honesty, and yet so many of us struggle with honesty. We are dishonest with others and we are dishonest with ourselves. We hide the truth, or dress it up to make it easier to hand over to others.

One important aspect to living happily, in my opinion, is being really honest with yourself, and that means owning and understanding your emotions. You can be strong, and capable, and powerful, and beautiful, and be scared. It is okay to feel scared. You can be perfectly okay on your own, and yet feel needy. It is okay to feel needy. You can be a kind, loving, attentive, patient, careful person, and feel angry. It is okay to feel angry. All of your emotions have value.

We feel things that don’t fit with who we think we are, and so we negate them. We don’t allow ourselves to acknowledge that we are scared, or stressed, or sad, or angry because we don’t WANT those emotions. We deny our feelings their proper voice, and so they live just under the surface of our skin: scratching at our sense of selves and well-being.

Being honest with yourself allows you to be honest with others. Acknowledge and respect your own emotions. Learn to give your emotions a voice. Explore your emotions and learn to say “I feel afraid. I feel afraid that I might not be doing a good job.” Or “I feel angry. I feel angry because I don’t feel respected.”, or “I feel lonely. I feel lonely because I am missing something important in my life”.

These words give you power. Understanding and naming how you feel changes an emotion from something that is arbitrarily happening TO YOU into something you can look at, affect and address.

By being honest with yourself, you enable yourself to be honest with others. You no longer need to fear sharing your truths with others. You no longer need to hide from others what you feel. Understanding your emotions means you don’t need to hide them. You have justified the way you feel and honesty only requires you communicate those reasons.

This all leads to happiness because honesty with yourself gives you the power to be honest with others, which means you can tell others how you feel and what you need, and that ability means you don’t have to hide. You can be who you are. You can feel what you feel. You can tell others what you need. You know what you feel. It seems so simple, but is so profound.

Be honest with yourself. Be honest with yourself in all your emotions. Own your sadness, your loneliness, your fear. Own your bliss, your love, your gratitude. Own your melancholy, boredom, curiosity. Own it all. Set yourself free with acceptance and self-learning.

Knowing these emotions allows you to move past them into other emotions. It allows you to understand them and resolve or embrace them. It allows the voice inside to speak to you and tell you what those emotions have to say. Embrace all the emotions, and give them a voice so that they can move on.

It will take you one step closer to happy.