These week happened a lot of interesting things that made me reconsider my ideas. However, the most interesting one is a little story by itself but with a huge meaning behind.

La felicidad son momentos

This was the little phrase that my teacher of Asian Studies told us during her class. She said that if we want to find true happiness we didn’t need a huge novel or a melodramatic story like the ones in books and films, what we really need was to recognize our own capacity to be happy by ourselves.

After she told us this thought, I couldn’t help but smile. She was completely right, most of us look for this great story that will change our view of life, that make us reconsider everything that we ever done and will push us to try harder, to work better and to smile more, but it shouldn’t be that way because we will not be able to find true happiness if we are not able to find it within ourselves.

My quest of happiness

I could easy relate to her idea because it’s most likely the kind of thought I’ve been using all these years in order to endure my life: A few years ago I was diagnosed with depression, - and whether my case was not the worst that my therapist had seen, she thought it was pretty serious.

Since I was little (let’s say something like 12-13 years old) I always saw the world in a really negative way, always looking the worst in the life and finding more reasons to be sad. However, after a few years I finally recognized my condition and I started taking a few steps in order to change it – like medication & therapies – I understood that the force that encourage you to fight with depression comes from yourself, from your own capacity to accept that you deserve to be happy.

So I analysed my surroundings in order to see how they could be happy (or at least not as sad as I was) and I found something really interesting: The happiest people are no always happy but rather when they can be happy, they decided to be happy.

Some of these people passed through really sad moments like the dead of a relative, of a pet, bad grades, or the end of a relationship; really some of those situations that cause a little of sadness. But they decided to not be sad, or at least not be sad always. I mean, they were sad, of course some of these things were really depressive, but they decided that instead of focusing in the bad experiences, they will focus in the positive things of life, they allowed themselves to be happy in their most obscure moments.

In that moment I realized that the true happiness maybe, and only maybe doesn’t mean that you need to be smiling and be happy for no reason all the time, but rather the true happiness means that you give yourself the chance of experience happiness, that you realize that you will enjoy those moments of happiness, no matter if they are long or short, if they are seconds or hours, you're just going to enjoy them.

So I decided to give myself a chance, I decided that when I found a moment where happiness could fill my heart, I would be happy no matter how hard some part of my mind said that I didn't deserve it. After I decided to change my way of thinking (and of course with the help of some medications and other things) the depression started to disappear from my life, little by little the months of sadness became days, and the attempts of suicide reduced themselves to just nightmares. In that exact moment I started to live once again, in that moment I started to know myself.

In the end I did a journey to happiness, but more than a journey it was just a discovery of my own capacity to be happy. Maybe you have made or will make a different kind of self-discovery of happiness, but the important thing is that you find the happiness by itself and in yourself not in other people, but yourself.

Meditate, exercise, find a passion, find a reason to live, find your own strengths and weaknesses… there are a lot of ways to start this rediscovery of yourself and your happiness, however the important thing is that you give yourself the chance. Give yourself the chance to live.