My Own Personal Happiness Project
People often look back on their teens as a time of stupidity and recklessness at worst, or naivete at best. They say things like “wish I knew then what I know now” or “youth is wasted on the young.” I can relate to the impulse to harshly judge your younger self as well as the youth of today. But often, teenagers are much more in touch with reality than adults.
Young people are wiser than we give them credit for — I know this was true in my case. Although I got many things wrong during my teens (bad boyfriend, low self-confidence, fear of failure), there was at least one thing that I had right. I knew that happiness was important to me. How important it was and how to achieve the state of being happy and at peace in my life was something I learned over and over until it finally stuck. I was in my forties at the time.
Lesson Number One
The realization that happiness was indeed something important to me hit in high school. By the time I was a senior, I was constantly being asked what I wanted to do after graduation. Frankly, I didn’t have a clue and it didn’t seem that sitting in my childhood bedroom reading books and daydreaming was a viable career path (although considering that I spend most of my time reading and writing now, maybe I was onto something).
