How Do You Find Happy?
When I was 35 I decided I was done living a life that was death by a thousand paper cuts.
We all know that feeling, of being caught in the flood of small, meaningless things that by necessity make up most of our lives. Suffocating on the status quo, I was doing the right things, checking all the boxes — college, career, friends, relationships, entertainment, active social life, etc. — but I wasn’t happy. Sort of happy, yes, but not really.
I wasn’t living for me. I was living for the accumulation of stuff, for validation, for acceptance, for other people’s definition of happiness but not for my own. It took having a near death experience and losing my cousin to decide to never go back to that slow death. I am not going to die having wasted my life in someone else’s coffin of a check box. Never again.
What we don’t realize is that so much of what we think makes us happy doesn’t actually make us happy. Our internal compass is set to safe, not happy. We often do things to numb or busy ourselves, mistaking not feeling pain for happy. How do you recalibrate for happy?
I found it by following the feeling of freedom. Dancing has always made me feel free. I’m lost in the music, the moment, the movement. If there’s a beat I’m moving whether I’m in public, standing in line, in my car, at work. It makes me happy because that’s so aligned, so me. Tuning into that feeling, I learned what else set my heart free. I felt like a kid again.
To prioritize happiness doesn’t mean to do a lot of thrill-seeking. Fun doesn’t necessarily equal happy. I still do the little things that we all have to do to live — grocery shopping, cleaning, paying bills, etc — but it’s a life less ordinary because it’s the life I created on my terms.
That doesn’t sound like much but the difference is profound. When I went back to corporate, I stood out like a sore thumb because I’m joyful and uncompromisingly myself.
No matter our other obligations, our greatest responsibility is to ourselves, to be authentic with ourselves and authentic in our choices. That makes all the difference between a life worth living and going through the motions of a life.
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