They say that happiness isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. You can’t constantly be in state of happiness because it’s unnatural. That’s when we get into toxic positivity; bottling up "negative” emotions and not dealing with them until they erupt because you can’t hold it in any longer. That’s why I titled this post “A journey with happiness” instead of “On the road to happiness.” Being happy takes constant effort, but it takes managing all emotions instead of trying to be just one single emotion.
It’s allowing everything to blossom within you. A rose doesn’t only let the flowers grow, it lets the thorns grow too. Those thorns can seem dangerous at first, but you can’t admire the rose without being aware of the thorns, just like our more “negative” emotions. I keep putting negative in quotation marks because they aren’t necessarily negative, but are perceived to be so. Why is that? Why is being sad or down seen as a negative emotion? Why can’t emotions just be emotions rather than categorized into “positive” and “negative” emotions?
I guess I’m writing this blog because in therapy, I keep getting told “you must be feeling more positivity being home.” I mean, technically I guess if you can say that I’m happy to be home, but I wouldn’t say that my “happy meter” is any higher than it was before. It’s about the same, except now I have support, which of course makes a huge difference in my overall wellbeing and attitude.
I just feel annoyed when people make it seem like happiness is an end goal rather than something that you consistently need to work with rather than towards. I get annoyed when we’re constantly shoving tasks and outcomes into the spaciousness of our lives, rather than settling into whatever it is that moment has to offer. We’re afraid of sitting within our all of our emotions, so we hustle toward happiness, thinking that it’ll make a difference, but it won’t. It’ll be temporary, until we have to work toward it again.
I think it would just be easier if we were taught to manage actually feeling our feelings rather than working to just get rid of the feelings we don’t want to feel. Who knows, maybe I’m just up too early with a lot of thoughts on my mind. Maybe I need to go back to sleep, whatever. I’ll post this. Thanks for reading if you got this far. Let me know what you think in the comments or something, or throw me a like. Peace.