I absolutely love this truth. For some, dear reader, this may seem a bit scary even mean. However, consider this from another angle, if you are not responsible for your own happiness who is? The answer of course is other people. Other people whom you cannot control and who may not have your own interests and needs in mind, let alone your happiness. And if they’re responsible for your happiness, does that make you responsible for theirs? Does that mean that you are expected to sacrifice yourself to their whims and desires in order to make them happy? How can you possibly be expected to know what will make them happy?
We humans are such fickle creatures and are almost never really satisfied. How can we all collectively be responsible for other people’s happiness and never our own? This constant cycle of pleasing people without thought to our own happiness can only leave us all miserable and unhappy. How freeing is it to say that “I am responsible for my happiness and you are responsible for yours”?
It is a reclamation of our own autonomy and choice. It frees us of the shackles of other people’s actions and reliance on them to do the “right thing” and allows us to fully stand in our own power. There are countless stories of human resilience, where people in terrible conditions were still able to choose not happiness but deep abiding joy. These are people who fully embraced their own power and would not allow their joy to be robbed by their oppressors or abusers. It was a way to take back what power they could to refuse to allow a prison to be one.
It is not easy to choose joy. It is not easy to be positive in the face of terrible circumstances and sometimes we do need to “sit in the suck”. I’m not an advocate of toxic positivity, because I don’t believe in suppressing negative emotions. I also don’t believe in feeding negative emotions. There is a time and place to process what’s going on, but not to swim in it, ‘till your fingers get all pruny. Acknowledge the “suck”, say it stinks, allow yourself to feel the unfairness, the injustice and general stink of whatever the situation is. Then cultivate your choices and possible responses.
This entire blog is devoted to a positive response of “the suck”. I did not have the time, energy and resources to live out a certain lifestyle. I could have easily gotten stuck in a negative mindset that I would never get to do the things I dreamed about doing. That I would continue to wish my life away and watch the years tick by until I was too old and sick to even enjoy the things even if I finally managed to save up the money to go do them. It would have been easy to shake my fist at a system that prevents so many people from making positive steps forward with stagnant wages, inflation and other social ills and give up. Instead, I looked around at what I could do instead. The answer was, I could do a lot. As it turns out, it allowed me to live out my values better than the original plan.
I did not have to rely on anyone to change the system. I simply went off and started making different choices. I choose to reevaluate my local community and see it in a new light. I choose to find happiness in the little things, seeing even small moments as things worthy of a bucket list. I will most likely write a post at a later date and time about cultivating daily gratitude, because that is what has helped to cultivate my happiness the most. I choose joy and I choose to be responsible for my own happiness. What a wonderful and freeing feeling that has been.
Budget Bliss: Bucket List 