UNSOLICITED ADVICE ON HOW TO BE HAPPY

On the shower floor of my college house bathroom, I sobbed and sobbed until there weren't any tears left to cry. I listened to the song and let the water, burning hot, fall on my skin. A Lot of the time, I think there's something wrong with me, other times I believe that feeling emotions so strongly is a good thing. It comes and it goes, it goes and then it comes back, a feeling that I’ll never be able to be in the present because I am living my life so much in the past, in the future, in the unknown and known too well. 

There are a multitude of situations that I feel necessary to sometimes think about and others where I don't believe it is necessary at all, but sometimes that line gets blurred and I'm writing about the same thing in my journal that I was writing about two years ago. 

Noah Kahan says “it's better to die numb, than feel at all” 

The Lumineers say “it's better to feel pain, than nothing at all” 

Which side of the coin is true here? A life where you are running from your pain or the one where you feel like it's the only thing keeping you alive. 

I'm only 23, I'm young, I'm inexperienced, I have so much emotion yet to feel but even now I feel wise in the sense that I can understand things on a deeper level, which I guess comes with exposure to hurt and to life. What I wish I knew when I was 18 is that I didn't know everything in the way I thought I did, and I'm sure in 5 years time I'll look back and have many things that I wish I knew right now, but somehow don't. Everyday of my life I am confused to some extent, there will probably never be a time where I feel like I've learned it all. I still have yet to find answers to questions I asked years ago, I still think about the things I thought about when I was 16. 

If you ask 100 different people what the key to happiness is, you are going to get 100 different answers because the answer is within yourself. Oh how I have had my fair share of being completely and utterly unhappy. Mad at everyone who looked like they were having a good time, in a good relationship, seemed to have it all figured out. But being bitter truly gets you nowhere. I have lived two separate lives of not sharing anything and sharing too much. Not feeling anything at all and feeling everything all of the time, being unsuccessful in reaching a middle ground. No matter how many times I sit here and tell myself the past is the past, I still think about it frequently. I find myself looking forward to the summers without even realizing I'm not looking forward to a new summer but reminiscing on one that has already passed, and wishing for that back. There is an extent to which we should wear our hearts on our sleeve because although that is praised, it's not praised when the heart gets ugly. I think that we can get so caught up in feeling everything that needs to be felt that we are focused on being sad and staying sad when it is time to move on. 

It is not happiness vs sadness, being happy in life vs. being depressed in life, the two work together and it's much more beneficial to learn that while you're young than wait your whole life to come to that realization and look back and regret all the happiness you missed because you were too busy telling yourself you can’t achieve it. I’m not writing any of this to tell anyone how to live their life, but maybe some people need that direction. Unsolicited is called unsolicited for a reason, and maybe if I had listened to some people now and then, I would have learned shit the easier way rather than the hard way. But I was too stubborn to hear it. May your stubbornness aid you in life without blinding you to obvious truths. Alas, here we have : 

UNSOLICITED ADVICE ON HOW TO BE HAPPY 

Never, not even for a second, stop being who you are. Changing yourself to fit other people's preferences and changing yourself for someone to like you is going to cause you to run further and further away from yourself your entire life. One day you will be sitting somewhere you don’t want to be, with people you do not like, having the worst time of your entire life, and think to yourself “how the fuck did I end up here.” You are not meant for anyone who does not like you for yourself. I know it is much easier said than done, I know it is terribly hard not to change yourself for a boy - but the joy you will feel when you are with people who love you unconditionally cannot ever compare to being accepted for a fake persona you put on like a character. In your worst times, people are going to get bored of you. In your best times, people are going to hate you because you are happy and they are not. Most of the time it has nothing to do with you unless you are truly a terrible person, but you should not ever for a second think your life will be better if you were someone else, or looked different, or reacted differently. If you are not yourself, whole heartedly, you are nobody. You were made the way you were made for a reason and I wish I could shake everyone into truly seeing they are perfect the way they are. YOU ARE PERFECT THE WAY YOU ARE. There are people who are going to adore and love you for the things you don’t even notice about yourself, little girls who will look up to you for being your true self, people who tell you “you made me feel comfortable being myself”.  The truth of the matter is you can be the sweetest, crispiest, shiniest, best tasting apple in the entire world and there is still going to be someone who hates apples. 

Do everything in your power to not succumb to the terrible idea that being skinny is better than living your life. Because it is not. 

A lot of the memories I have of my eating disorder don’t even feel necessarily real to me because I can’t believe that I would actually do that to my body. It was this push and pull at first of eating too much food in the dining hall and then not eating at all for a day or two. Binging without purging, just starving myself instead. When I first started hanging out with the guy I ended up dating for the rest of college, I was so concerned with the way I looked all of the time. Every single one of our shared friends told me time after time that I was not his type, it was never going to happen. And while, listen guys, I just KNEW it was most certainly going to happen, that doesn't mean that what I was told every week didn't affect me. There was just no way that I was allowing this boy to come and hang out with me if I didn't feel good about my body. No way he was going to come over if I even dared to eat dinner that night. I canceled plans we would have because I just wanted to lay in bed and cry over the fact that I hated the way I felt in my own skin. “You’re crazy” he said “I know” I replied. I dont know whats worse, honestly. Being in denial of what you’re doing to yourself or being so fully aware of it and not being able to find yourself to care.

Gym. starve. Go out. I feel like I'm gonna faint. At least I look skinny tonight. Start thinking about Sunday morning on Friday night because that's when I would allow myself to eat an actual meal next. Terrible for the mind. Worse for the soul. It was the first night of halloweekend and I had done everything that week to look as skinny as possible in my costume. I was in miks dorm room with a few other girls and I stood there and had this terrible feeling of doom just looming over me. It wasn't a feeling that I was going to pass out, I could put up with that, it was much, MUCH worse. I needed food right this second or something terrible was going to happen to me and I could feel it, my mind circling over and over again trying to think of the last time I had something to eat and I couldn't even come to a conclusion. I was so scared of what I had done to myself at that point that I walked right out of the dorm and straight across the street to the dining hall, full biker girl outfit in check. It was like my whole body and self was going to collapse in seconds. I couldn't even see straight. I hadn't had a sip of alcohol and I was walking around this dining hall looking like it was the end of my night, not the beginning. “Get a grip of yourself Mary, get something in your stomach” emergency. My body knew it was an emergency. My MIND knew it was an emergency, and I still settled on eating 1 piece of whole grain toast with a tablespoon of peanut butter and truly believing that was enough. 

It's not cool to not have the energy to talk to your friends in the living room. It's not cool to show up to a party and sit down on the ground and pout the whole night because you feel too full. It's not cool to let an app on your phone determine how much you are allowed to eat. It's lame. That's lame. And it's lame to walk around your apartment at 11pm just so you can reach 1,000 active calories on your apple watch. 

More parties I skipped, more dinners I didn't eat, more meals I cooked for my boyfriend and friends that were so tremendously high in calories but that I wouldn't dare touch. It's a common thing for people with eating disorders to make meals for other people, making something so calorie dense and so good that it gives you a high that you aren't eating it but other people are. It's a sickness, truly. Being that competitive and obsessed over something so silly as a plate of buttered pasta. 

I was constantly making myself a project that I needed to work on. Tracked the calories I burned and the ones I ate and logged the milk I drank and steps I took. “No I won't be going out, I'll be going to the gym” “yes I will go out tonight but I am going on a 5 mile walk first”. Since I was 17 one obsession just took over the other. I was addicted to purging, which turned into just being addicted to starving, which led to just being addicted to health and fitness - the perfect and least obvious way to get away with a crippling eating disorder. I was going to the gym, I was eating the food, drinking the water, eating the desserts, taking the walks, and I continued to tell myself in my mind that I was never doing enough. I reached out to someone on instagram about a workout plan that allowed me to feel skinny all of the time, not just when I go out on the weekends. I wish I could hug her so tightly, tell her that life improves so significantly when you let yourself laugh in the passenger seat with your boyfriend right next to you eating ice cream after going out to dinner. That life is so much more fulfilling when instead of eating rice cakes when your friends eat the meal you made them, you can sit down and enjoy it with them. That no matter how much work you put into getting better, the second you decide to be so cruel to your body it will never leave you. You will move on and eat again and not think about calories everyday, but you won’t ever in your life be free from that voice way in the back of your head that you created. It will be there your entire life, lingering in the background like someone you try so hard to get rid of. It's not worth it girls, for those who don't already know exactly what I am talking about. The feeling of emptiness in your stomach is not worth the piece of your life that gets sucked right out of you and will never come back. It's not worth the fact that you will never be as carefree as you were as a little girl, licking the raw batter off the mixing spoon having no clue the exact amount of calories in the bit you just took. You will never find happiness if you are counting on the thinness of your body to create it.

Realize that you have the power to wake up and just be happy with what you have. Everything is so fucking beautiful when you look at it with love in your eyes and wonder in your heart. You can, at any point in your life, decide to change the narrative. I know that feeling of not wanting to drive past a place or visit somewhere because of the heart wrenching memories that wash over you when you do. But what if one day you just program your mind to look at it with a fresh set of eyes. Laugh in places you’ve cried, dance in places you’ve shut down, bring better company to a place that makes you think of him. Do everything with a better mindset, change the narrative of your life because it is YOUR life. We get so used to the things we tell ourselves are so normal, when in reality they should be labeled as absolutely wonderful. Everything is interesting, everything is so exciting, life is sitting here waiting for us to live it. So much of human life is wasted on the waiting and the wanting. Waiting for something better to come along, wanting something bigger than what we already have. But when you can look around yourself and be happy with what you already have at your fingertips, you will be able to feel joyful in the mundanity of life, no matter where you are, who you are with, or what you are doing. 

You will get lost in a trap of never feeling like your life is good enough if you are constantly telling yourself that it’s not good enough. Ever heard the saying “focus on the good and the good will come into focus”? People say that for a reason. When you choose to really think about the fact that life has so many special moments during our everyday lives you are much more open to receiving the happiness that you are not allowing yourself to feel. At the end of it all, life is made up of normal days, with normal people, living a normal life. Listen to the sounds of life, submerge yourself in the water, soak in the sun and pray to something, but stop waiting for everything to be perfect to be happy because it will never be as perfect as you think it may be. 

Decenter romantic love from your life, do not let the lack of a relationship convince yourself that you are not good enough. Bask in being single, enjoy living by yourself or with your friends. At this point in your life in your 20’s you do not need to be in love. You do not need to be in a situationship. You need to read, you need to go out with your friends, you need to learn a new hobby, sign up for a workout class, apply for a new job you will actually enjoy, you need to learn how to love your own company with nobody else around, learn what you like and dislike, what you want in someone else and what you want yourself to be for that person. Your health, the things you're interested in that you stopped thinking about, your family and your friends, your career,  your beliefs and your opinions, learning new things you have never taken the time to, expanding your horizons and experiencing new things, this is what you need to focus on. You have the rest of your life to share it with someone else. You do not, and should not, ever associate being alone with being lonely because these years of your life are so beneficial to sit with just yourself and yourself alone. The second you center love or you center a confusing boy (or girl for that matter), the second you are putting your happiness in the hands of someone else is the second your happiness will become slippery and they will drop it and you will be forced to pick it up and that is going to be very, very humbling. Love can be so fucking beautiful when it is not rushed. What happens when we believe we will only be happy when we find someone else is that you start convincing yourself you found the right person when they are not. Ignoring the red flags and wrong signs will become second nature because you will get so caught up in thinking you finally found a person so you can finally be happy and therefore everything will work itself out, but it wont. The things you ignored in the beginning will be the reasons you leave in the end, and in that time frame between the beginning and the end you will put yourself through much more turmoil trying to make something work when it just doesn't. 

At the end of the day, ending the stigma that being single is boring, or lame, or makes you not worthy, is what is going to help you out the most. There is so much to learn about yourself when you spend time alone, working on becoming who you want to become. Sit in the solitude and express your gratitude that you get to be with yourself for your whole life. You are holding yourself back when you think about someone else for too long. It is a disservice to your body, mind, and soul. Life will go on. Love comes in one hundred different forms, not just through a significant other. If you are full of love, then you should know that the magnitude of your love is being matched by someone else and why settle for anything less than that? Let the good things just come to you naturally instead of seeking them out. Have all the best things in your life not been unexpected? Have they not caught you by surprise? Have you not experienced something so transforming and magnificent on a day you thought would be ordinary? Expect nothing, appreciate everything. Expectations and comparison are the quickest routes to suffering. Instead of searching for love in a man or a woman or whoever, search for it in everything else out there. It is everywhere. There are a million types of love that you will experience in this lifetime, but never the same kind of love twice. Cherish what you have and be grateful for what you once had and be thrilled with the fact that you will feel loved by more than just one person, or one thing. And instead of waiting for love to find you, send it out into the world, and it will come back tenfold. 

Instead of focussing on being happy, focus on making others happy. I have had so many hard conversations in my time on earth. With friends, boyfriends, family members, coworkers, strangers. As humans all we want is to feel a sense of connection. What I have learned in all my years of the restaurant industry and especially in my years of bartending is that most everyone is having a day that could be made even better with the slightest act of kindness. I have to let my initial judgements that roam through my mind simply pass before I convince myself that I know why a person is acting a certain way. People are rarely the way we think of them, they are rarely who we create them to be in our heads, even if all signs are pointing to confirmation. If you meet people and observe people and talk to them under the impression that all our preconceived notions are true, you will just be miserable in your own beliefs. Every single person that you come into contact with is going through stuff that you will never have a single idea about. Girls are insecure, men are insecure, you must not care about the way people talk about you or talk to you because it really has nothing to do with you. Most people out there are hurting in their own ways, to their own degree, over something that happened yesterday or something that happened 7 years ago. Suffering is universal, and if we take the time out of our day to compliment someone, tip someone a little extra, tell someone they look like they are doing great, let someone know they matter to you, then your life is going to feel much brighter and joyful.  

I think that one of our purposes on this earth is to do good for other people. Fake nice is overrated. There is too much pressure, especially on females, to always be cheerful, always be overly nice to people you meet, be on our best behavior, be super friendly to everyone we cross paths with. That's not what is fulfilling. I think killing people with kindness is a wonderful thing to practice and I think it makes you feel much better than being a bitch, but don't let anyone convince you that you’re not allowed to feel the way you feel towards people who aren't nice to YOU. I guess that what I'm trying to say is that the things that you do in private, or behind closed doors, or silently with only a few people knowing, is a lot more beneficial to both parties than being kind to someone who is a bitch to you. All that will do is take the energy out of you and leave you feeling weird about it. Instead of wasting your kindness on people who, for lack of a better term, do not deserve it, go out into the world and decide to make a stranger's day. It is much more important to actually be there for your friends and be a comfortable person to talk to and to be a light in someone's day than it is to just pretend to be like that for people who aren't going to appreciate it. 

At our disposable we have so many people in this world we have yet to meet and you shouldn't keep telling yourself it's weird to approach someone that you don’t know. I have always thought that it's the oddest thing when you're standing in an elevator with one or two other people and nobody says anything. WE ARE ALL HUMAN. For the love of God, some of the best conversations I have had in my life were with random people in line, on the street, with a girl who complimented my outfit. Do not be afraid to connect with people in a world that tells you it's weird to do so. Life is so much better when you do the opposite of what everyone tells you to do. Strangers are so much more interesting than we initially think. It will open your eyes so wide to the idea that we are all just the same people in different bodies, thinking a lot of the same thoughts. Choose to be human to the fullest because you are not fooling anyone if you act any differently. When you get older and look back on your life you will notice you are a product of every person you took the time to get to know, all the hobbies you picked up from them, all the lessons you've learned, and all the lives you changed without ever knowing you did. 

Stop taking yourself so seriously. There are many very serious things that will happen to us in our life here on earth and I don’t want to sit here and diminish that. But in our day to day lives, it's okay to take a deep breath and just tell yourself that everything is going to work out for the better and nothing is ever as serious or life threatening as we make it out to be. You are allowed to mess up and to make mistakes and take work off to do something with your friends. Life is not here for us to be prisoners. If you don't like your partner, break up with them, if you don't like your job, find a new one, if you don't like your outfit, put something else on, if you don't like your life, change it. There are so many different ways that we can put ourselves into a box of what we think we should be doing because that's what everyone else is doing. You can wake up and recreate yourself every single morning if you please. There are no limits to how many new things you can try or experiment with. I often talk about never losing the inner child in you and I say that because when you were a child you weren't worried about anything other than enjoying what you were doing and having fun. My view on life is that if you miss a turn you will find a new road to go down. Everything is going to turn out perfectly fine. All you are doing is self sabotaging by not making an absolute joke out of everything. Laughing at yourself and dancing like an idiot is much better than getting mad over something so small and sitting in the corner all night. You are going to miss out on so many amazing things if all you do all of the time is tell yourself how bad and terrible things are and how we must be serious if we want to be respected. WHO CARES. Everyone puts on this odd persona that we have to be professional and stern in order to be taken seriously but I think that actions are a lot louder than words and I think that the end of the day being someone who gets shit done while also being a bright light in a dim room is much better than being known as the professional one who keeps their head down and smile off. When i'm in a dark spot and feel like this is the way I will be my whole life I go out into nature and put my feet to the earth, count my blessings, believe that new beginnings happen every morning, and tell myself that really life is so fun and laughable and glorious and there are so many amazing things happening everyday which means something amazing is bound to happen to me any day now. Everything begins and everything ends in your own mind and your own mind alone, what you chose to give power to will have power over you. Its okay to be sad, but it's much better knowing that it's also okay to be happy. 

Last and most certainly not least, you have got to stop dwelling on the past thinking it will change your future. What happened has happened, what's done is done. When I said comparison is one of the quickest routes to suffering, I don't just mean comparing yourself to others, I am also talking about comparing yourself to who you were before, what you were doing last year, what you looked like in highschool. A number of times I have believed that I will never experience a night like this one night, or meet a boy like the one I still can't stop thinking about, or feel as good as I felt two years ago, but the truth is I will. Time and time again. I feel that I get nostalgic in a terrible, tragic way, thinking about how much I'll miss something before it's yet to even pass. All this does to me is make me ache for something that will not be coming back. I want to play baseball again in my front yard with my brother when we were kids and I want to go back to the summer of covid when all my friends and I lived at my camp but no matter how hard you want to go back you can't wish something into existence. If you think of all the times that you wish you could experience again, find comfort in the fact that there will be an abundance of times like that down the road. There are so many people you are going to meet and fall in love with that make you completely forget about someone you thought you never could. So many nights that will top your favorite of favorite nights, in ways that you can’t even think of. The gift of life is that it never stops for you even if you want it to. I know it's painful to think of how things could have gone and think about how much you miss the way things used to be, but you will miss out on your life if you don't appreciate where you are. Leave the past in the past, have hope in the future, and find love in the present. 

At the end of this all I hope that a few people realize that you don't need to go on this dramatic search for happiness. If you search for it, you will miss it. You will never find it because happiness is not something to be found. Every emotion is part of life, you will go through every emotion imaginable. We too often let ourselves be too sad for too long or too angry for too long or too confused about things we won't ever have the answers to, but nobody ever lets themselves be happy for too long in fear we will get it taken away from us. But the happiness and the magic cannot leave if it is within you. Life is too short to hate yourself, to stay in miserable situations, to not be absolutely fascinated with everything around us. Do what you love to do, make the best out of the situation you are in, stop blaming yourself for being human, don’t take the things you have for granted, love your friends like your family, and be let yourself be blissfully overwhelmed with the fact of life that if you let everything go and let yourself be, happiness will come to find you.