Choosing happiness

You know, it used to really piss me off when people said things like "you should choose happiness." It seems ridiculous that I would wallow in bloody unhappiness when I could just easily choose to be happy. I couldn't wake up in the morning and choose how to feel, now could I?

But now I'm realising that maybe it's not about that daily choice, but about choosing happiness in the face of certain situations. You look at whatever has happened in your life and ask yourself how you want to feel in life... not about the situation itself, not about how certain things or people made you feel, but about what you want in life.

You can choose to be unhappy, hurt, angry, whatever. And sometimes, those feelings right all those wrongs. People realise that they fucked up. That they made you feel like shit. But sometimes they don't. They think that you are being unreasonable. You are expecting too much. You are imagining shit.

And in such situations, it's sometimes easier to just let go of those feelings and choose happiness or whatever the fuck is closest to happiness. And it may seem like giving up or being too easy with forgiveness or not having enough self-respect, but so what? When every day is a struggle, maybe we can't be too hard on ourselves for choosing the easy way out. Maybe our kindness towards ourselves starts with letting go of things.

I still think about this time someone told me, "I thought you hated me." Simple words that shifted the blame to me. Suddenly, I was the angry one. The hateful one. Not the other person. And even recently, I thought about how easily people can turn the story around. But we too, can do this. Not to blame other people for your wrongs, but to choose how you want to walk away from a situation, how you want to end a conversation, what you want as an outcome.

And maybe, somewhere down the road, you will wish you had stood up for yourself. That you hadn't let people get away with things easily, and these feelings of course will be valid, but that's a problem for another day, isn't it?