So I have been recently going on random Facebook rants about happiness, finding happiness, being happy, staying happy, happy, happy, happy, to the point where I thought people may have thought I’d gone crazy. So I relaxed the amount of happiness posts, though the sentiment and the want to pen something poignant about it still remained close to heart. Thus this post was born. Ahhhhh (cue the angelic singing). But the true birth of my happiness fest was hard fought and quite cliche actually. You know how it goes, I’d been living a pretty happy life: contented relationship, beautiful babies, booming business, great friends, with sides of leisurely pleasure, like traveling, thrown in at my discretion. Then Life happened. As it always seems to do at the most inconvenient time, as if there is ever a good time for disaster. Without boring you with the petty details of my cozy little life’s unraveling, I’ll sum it up by saying I was hit in all the areas I just mentioned. Talk about going from 100 to 0! Relationship on the rocks, baby hospitalized, long term friendships ended as quickly as they’d begun. Then the depression of things falling apart set in as a dark cloud over my life for what I consider too long. The pressure of things falling apart for a perfectionist is indescribable. I hadn’t failed at much at life at this point, so to be seemingly failing at everything was too much. I no longer saw the joys of raising my babies, but was burdened more by responsibilities of parenting. I looked at everything wrong in my relationship and everything I felt I was missing in my partner and let it upset me. I lost the exuberance that I’d had to build and maintain a business. I was affected.

Affected and isolated. As I drove myself deeper and deeper into my problems, I began to feel like I couldn’t trust anyone, as my trust had just been freshly shattered, so I didn’t feel I could even talk to anyone. This lasted for months and months on end, characterized by me going through the motions of participating in life, but not enjoying it. But as they say, ‘you get sick and tired of being sick and tired,’ I looked at my beautiful daughter and son who seemed to have advanced to the next stage of maturation right before my eyes without me really seeing it happen. And it scared me. I realized I didn’t want to miss another moment of right now because I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. I no longer wanted to give the people who’d hurt me the power of  stealing my happiness by allowing the negative emotions associated with those people and the events that had transpired in the past to overcome me in the present. Instead, I choose to learn from those mistakes, and take them happily with me into the future.

So on my fight back to happy, I learned that happiness truly was a choice. And as I write here today, most things in my life have not been pieced back even close to a shadow of its’ former self, but I can’t let that be the definition of my happiness. Today, I don’t want to make my happiness another person’s responsibility. My happiness is so fragile, I choose to take care of it myself. I don’t want to define my happiness by arbitrary societal standards. I want to define my happiness by feeling like I am contributing to my life’s purpose: to be an excellent mother, a compassionate human, and a voice of truth, with sides of leisurely pleasure thrown in at my discretion.