The Writer

I stumbled across a blog called Grumpy Comments and it has provided me with great amusement (especially with the how to destroy your copy of the Hobbit post). It’s a fun read, I’d suggest checking it out.

But one thing the writer mentioned this week was the idea that when you’re unhappy, you actually can’t remember what it’s like to be happy (found here).

This is something I have thought about before, and it was refreshing to see someone else feels the same way. Sometimes, even when I was the happiest I have ever been, I often would feel a little bit tainted (as the author put it) because I would start to wonder if my own failings as person would somehow destroy my happy little place. Then, when you’re down and those moments where you were happiest seem so far away, you struggle to remember that moment when you actually were happy. You may have amazing things in your life to be happy about, but you’re so down, that sometimes you can’t remember them. I once knew a person who said that they had no idea how to be happy, that even if they wanted it with their heart & mind, one day, without warning, they would feel unhappy and simply abandon whatever pursuit it was that brought them joy instead of addressing why they felt that way. I told them it seemed like such a sad way to live, giving up on something before you’ve ever really begun.

But why do we do this? Why do we self sabotage happiness? Why can’t we enjoy it? Some people just don’t feel worthy of happiness, some of us are so afraid of spoiling the thing that makes them happy that they’d rather walk away from it, and some of us simply have been hurt so many times that our minds reject the very idea that we’ll actually be happy this time. By the time we’ve stopped analyzing, we’ve likely beaten our happiness into the ground.

Perhaps, we need to remind ourselves that we all deserve happiness, even if sometimes we don’t feel like it. We shouldn’t abandon our pursuit of it and we most certainly shouldn’t beat ourselves up if sometimes we question it, as long as we’re not destructive about it. Perhaps if we shift our focus just a little bit and remind ourselves that our happiness is deserved and worth working through our own inability to see it sometimes.