my great big feelings

I spent a long time writing and rewriting this. Deleting the stories I wrote when my feelings were different. 

For me, I’ve always had a rough definition of what it meant to be happy. Some days, it meant that all my friends came over and we swam in the lake and watched movies and laughed all night long. Other days it’s crawling in between my mom and dad in bed and watching the news as we all fall asleep.

On my good days, happy means almost anything. It means getting told I’m doing a good job at work, or someone validating my purpose. It means wearing new shoes, getting ice cream after dinner, it means my parents had a good day at work, it means my sister is bringing her puppies over later.

On bad days, happy seems to be a lot more of a distant, foreign term to me. It feels like a fruit growing at the top a tree just a little too high to reach. On those days, happy moments are few and far between, and they mean a lot more.

Like I said before, I struggled about knowing what happiness meant. I thought about it as a relative term: “there are people who have it worse than me,” or I treated it as a societal norm: “people put so much pressure on others to act a certain way,” but finally, I came (or am coming) to terms with what happiness means for me.

I find myself dividing my life into "before the accident," and "after the accident," (meaning my car accident). I put a lot of pressure on other people to help me, to support me, and when they didn't tell me what I wanted to hear, I was left feeling more devastated than before. My accident brought along behaviors and emotions I have never experienced before, and I wasn't really sure what to do with them. 

There’s a lot of things in the world that make me feel things I don’t know how to describe yet.

I think I feel this confusion because there are things I am trained and raised to believe should make me happy, and when those things don’t, it makes me feel like I’m missing something, or that I don’t know what happiness truly is. Other times it was experiences that nobody could ever prepare for, and finding a way to navigate through them on your own.

I had to realize that I was the one waking up and facing this monstrosity of feelings every morning, and I had no right to push that onto other people. And honestly, there was nothing anybody could say that would make it better anyways.

You have to remember that nobody owes you anything. Nobody owes you their attention, their time in listening to you complain, the perfect phrase you want to hear... nothing. 

But what I decided was that instead of facing whatever it is, looking at it, tilting my head and frowning “what does this make me feel?” I just decided to close my eyes. That's not to say I didn't face my problems, but that I learned how to brace for impact, and how to wipe my palms off and stand back up again.

I had to let whatever comes, come. And if it makes me so stupidly happy, then so-be-it. People don't give themselves enough time or credit to let themselves feel happy about 'dumb' things. And if it doesn’t make me happy then I’m allowed to feel that way. And I’m allowed to change my mind if makes me happy later. I'm allowed to be confused, and lost. I have a right to as much time as I need to figure out how I'm going to make it better.

Like I talked about earlier, good days make all things feel a little brighter, bird-chirp-ier, sunshine-ier, but I appreciate the bad days because they allow me to feel all my feelings, my great big feelings, and slowly learn to understand and accept them. 

There’s a tall, tall list in my head that I think of when I’m trying to cheer myself up. I am blessed by an infinite number of things that make my life so beautiful. And I honestly just think that’s really all there is to being happy.

It’s understanding what makes you feel like you. And who makes you feel like sunshine.

It’s creating a sustainable, timeless appreciation for the little moments in life that you can use in the future when those moments seem too far away to reach.

Pay close attention to those moments, what you’re wearing, who you’re with, where you are, and use them as a warm, cozy blanket on a bad day.

And tomorrow, you can try again.