Maybe it's the beautiful weather and my beautiful friends that have been making me so manically happy lately, but I feel like a completely new person. It used to be that this totally uninhibited satisfaction was a rare treat-- I needed some sort of direct stimulus. There was no such thing as organic happiness without a reason, and it was more common for me to find the faults with myself, my current situation, and the day surrounding me.
But thanks to the waning moon, changing of the tides, or Venus finally sitting in the correct universal house aligned with Jupiter's moons or whatever, I feel, at the very least, content 99% of the time, if not ridiculously excited about nothing more than being alive. I can no longer find any flaws in my personality, and while the girl I used to be tells me I should be a little bit more modest and such a fact is within itself a flaw and something to feel guilty about, I don't care. I'm completely unapologetic. In saying that I can't find anything wrong with my mind, my body, my academic interests and hobbyist pursuits, I'm not saying that I'm better than anyone else. In fact, there are people I idolize (and even envy) for their talents, perseverance, intelligence, and the ability to remain so down-to-earth in the face of such distinctive lives. All I'm expressing is my newfound self-acceptance and ability to exist without picking apart my every action.
I'm not a prima donna; I'm just me. And I'll be damned if I'm not proud of that.
There should be no shame in happiness. For a long time, I believed the opposite, but it was merely from a lack of knowledge about the world as learned through the eyes of a person is genuinely high on life, not on getting off on their own misfortunes and lack of self-awareness.
I always thought being sad was an attribute to my art, and as an aspiring poet, I needed all the help I could get. I was afraid that if I normalized and regulated my life, I would lose the edge that made me intelligent, insightful, creative, and different from all the other teenage girls in the world who want to amount to something more than just another pretty face in a crowd.
In a way, being depressed to the point of throwing my life away was actually what saved me and my art form. I was so miserable that I didn't care what the future had in store, and I didn't care to find out-- in my mind, there was no hope for me so I might as well just give up on everything- being smart, writing my feelings down, having a stimulating social life. Everything was the same shade of grey. Every now and then, there was a flash of light from behind the curtain, but not enough to light up the room for a significant amount of time. The bad outweighed the good. The lifestyle I chose to keep up with was offering no reward in the longterm. I thought to myself, "if this is how writers and artists are expected to exist, fuck it. I'm done. Maybe I wasn't cut out to do this after all."
That's when I decided to become happy- if I couldn't be a writer, I didn't want to live like one. So maybe I wouldn't end up to be talented or unique....plenty of people go day-to-day just living as themselves and seem to be making it okay. There are worse things in life than just being average.
That thought being said, I compromised my dreams--built on heartache and angst--and started down the road to having a normal life. And you know what? The words came. I was astonished. I'm not really one to believe in miracles-just irony. But this turning point in my life seemed to fulfill both.
It was like bringing a flood light into a dimly lit room: before, you could see shapes, outlines, colors, but it was all fuzzy and abstract. Then, all of a sudden, things are instantly painted with this brilliant, shinning aura, to the point where your senses are overwhelmed.
Happiness doesn't happen all at once- you start by being a little less sad each day. But one morning, you'll wake up and realize this is what happy feels like, and you can't understand what you possibly saw in life before, and are a little bit disappointed that you're already 20 and just now starting to have a good time.
One can't truly write deeply about bone-crushing misery until she's forged through that period in her life towards a much more comfortable one. That's what I didn't understand. I could write about being sad in the moment, but I couldn't reflect on it, or make it more powerful and crippling by comparing it to all the wonderful things that exist to directly demonize and antagonize it.
My fear of living in order to help my art only hindered it.
Sometimes life hands you unexpected blessings. Just go with it. It always gets darkest (wait for it) right before it goes pitch black...that being said, that means, in the middle of a blackout, it can only get brighter.
If you want something enough, there's absolutely nothing standing in your way, so you have no excuse not to make it happen.
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