Life is a mess

It’s a hard life, living. Too many things need forgetting and forgiving, too many things to let go and let God, too many things to cry out and move on from, too many knock downs to get back up on, too many tears to smile away, too many goodbyes and apprehensive hellos, too many mistakes to learn from, too many no’s to recover from, too many flaws to appreciate, too many hurdles to eliminate, too many sorrys left unkept, too many decisions to regret, too many moments to reflect, too many heartbreaks to accept, I DIGRESS. Life is a fucking mess. The more you sit back and think about it, the deeper that realization gets. I don’t have a ‘how to’ manual on ‘how to be happy’, or ‘how to be whole’, or ‘how to be successful’, even through all the bullshit. Let’s face it, those lists are useless. You can’t find yourself in an online article linked on your Facebook, titled, “99 ways to live life to the fullest!’ You can read it, agree, make notes and nod your head and say, “Yes, I need to do some of these,” but it isn’t a solid solution. Happiness is something different for everyone. Some people think happiness would be finding the right one to spend their life with, some think happiness is going on a shopping spree, some think happiness can be found in the club, some think happiness is sitting at home watching Disney movies, some think happiness is family, some think happiness is a long bath with a glass of wine, some think happiness is just simply having enough money to make it through to the next pay day. Happiness is small and short lived, or monumental and continuous. It is found in people, in animals, in food, in television, in music, in nature, in dancing, in oceans and in something as simple as a hug. But the ‘mess’ of life is found in all those things too. It's never one or the other. So, when I ask myself or hear others ponder about ‘how to be happy’ I start to wonder if that is the right question to ask. I wonder if that word puts too much pressure on us.

The world shoves solutions in our face constantly. Get the newest name brands or freshest shoes, get that diamond bracelet. Look how good our new Oreo ice-cream dessert is! Get our new credit card with the lowest interest rate out there! Try our new triple patty burger with cheddar cheese and bacon! Get our new hair product that leaves your hair full of volume and moisturized. Try our new light coated foundation that keeps you flawless and oil free. COME COME COME, this WILL make you happy! And we buy into it because it does, for a minute or two, a month or three, it does make us happy. And that’s the point, we just wanna be happy. We’re constantly looking for a long-term solution to happiness and fulfillment. If we get the right education, and the right job, and the right partner we will and can be happy. And everything we do to get there is just that, us trying to get there… to happiness…to fulfillment. We just keep getting side tracked, by rejection, by heartbreaks, by hits of reality, by loss, by lovers, by fear, by health, by pain, by anxiety, by failures, by things beyond our control or foreshadowing. It just seems like we continuously fight and strive to get ‘there’ …and then we sometimes give up and accept that happiness is a lie, an impossible entity, a mythical being, that we only see in movies when the girl gets the promotion, and the guy gets the girl, or the parents get back together, or the girl stands up on stage and admits that she is flawed and everyone claps and everyone is happy, and at the end when the credits roll…you’re left thinking ‘Oh yes, complete happiness is possible.’

I don’t think happiness is impossible, but complete happiness (the happiness we all fight for) is a deceptive illusion that will keep you blinded by everything else around you. Yes, I did say, life is a fucking mess. It is hard, and that word doesn’t even grasp how fucking hard it can be. If I wrote down all the ways my life has been hard it would turn into a 600-page post that would make this post completely irrelevant in the end. Simply because life is hard for everyone, so I don’t need to tell you or prove to you how hard it can be, because you get it. And because life is hard, you just want to be happy, you just want to strive to do everything you can to be happy. Leading to many fuck ups and mistakes, but who cares? Because for a moment in time those mistakes made you happy.

This is not meant to be a ‘how to’ post on how you can be happier. I am no expert. I just like to write my thoughts down, because it makes me…happy. What else makes me happy? Well, education and learning makes me happy, I have friendships that make me super happy, I have a boyfriend who makes me beyond happy, I have coworkers who make me happy to come into work, I have creativity that I continue to challenge and let out that makes me incredibly happy, reading makes me calm and happy, taking a Lactaid pill so I can consume all the cheese and ice cream in the world makes me frantically happy, listening to music makes me reflectively happy, watching movies or addictive television shows makes me unapologetically happy, drinking coffee every morning and a glass of wine on a Friday night makes me tastefully happy. And the list goes on and on. So, when I ask myself ‘Are you happy?’ how can I say ‘No,’ when there is so much in my life that does. But many of us (including me), do say ‘No’ to that question, because they think that it means complete happiness. And that is an unreachable imaginary thing. Life is happiness, but it is also painful and hurtful and tiring and grueling and exhausting. It is a mess of everything. I think accepting that, is one little step in the right direction. Instead of trying to rid pain, or struggle, or hardships from your life, I think that we should accept that these are all pieces of the puzzle called life. Ew, did I just say that? I said this wasn’t a post about ‘how to’, or a column on advice, so my apologies on my cheesy preaching, but I am reflecting and thinking to myself as I type so it is more advice to myself. All I am saying is instead of the question, “Am I Happy?” or “How can I be happy?” maybe we should ask, “What makes me happy in my life” and than when that list is thought out, you may slowly realize that maybe you are happy, because you have things in your life that make it so. Sure, that does not mean that life is not a fucking mess, it just means that life is complex, and that happiness is not the end goal but current things that are happening in your life right now, it just means that there a plenty of pearls to be found right there along the dirt.