You Don't Have To Be Happy by Abigail

You Don't Have To Be Happy by Abigail - April 2016 Scholarship Essay

There are many really important things I have learned throughout my experiences in middle school and high school, and I continue to learn and expand on the trials I have been through. Although all the lessons I have learned throughout my life have somewhat an importance to me, there is one thing that stands out the most; you don't have to be happy. I know you are staring down at this essay in confusion thinking, "wait, I thought being happy was the goal?" or "everyone wants happiness though!" But I just want you to hear me out; you DON'T have to be happy. You really don't.

All through middle school and most of high school, I had a specific image of what happiness was, an image shaped by society and social media. Popularity, beauty, perfect body, perfect grades, etc. Those were the ideals I wished to achieve; perfection was the goal. And as an awkward teenager, these standards were almost impossible to attain in my own eyes. I wasn't comfortable with who I was, but I didn't want that image to be the one I was projecting to my peers. I wanted it to appear as though I had everything figured out, that I was content. What no one was telling me was that nearly EVERYBODY was self-conscious of who they were, nearly everybody had something they wanted to change about themselves, and nobody wanted to appear as though they were struggling with their goals in happiness.

"Be happy with who you are. Be comfortable in your own skin. Always love yourself." You hear these phrases often enough, and they are true, aren't they? My whole life, these phrases have been hammered into my mentality by so many people and in so many different settings. They became almost scripture to me. But I still wasn't happy. I wasn't comfortable with who I was. I didn't always love myself. That's not to say that I was always unhappy and didn't always think about being uncomfortable with who I was. But it was always there, the slight nagging in the back of my mind that told me I was not happy. I felt like I was sinning when I wasn't happy. It made me feel worse, and I just tried to hide my feelings under a thin layer of fabricated happiness.

My illusions of happiness weren't really what happiness is for me. There are many different ideas of happiness so I'm not going to say how you should be happy. I'm just trying to say that you don't always have to be happy to be happy. In order for me to find my balance of happiness, I had to break down in tears, I had to express my miserable emotions in ways I wasn't comfortable with. I had to be unhappy, but I didn't have to be unhappy alone.

You have to understand that feeling broken isn't necessarily an unhealthy thing; it's when you hide and lock the emotions away that it can become problematic. "When we suppress an emotion, the energy of that emotion does not go away. Instead, it subsides -- it sinks deeper. Rather than resolve the emotional energy through some form of response, we choose (however unconsciously) to hold it inside. Though the immediacy of the feeling may pass, the energy does not. We hold it deep inside and, typically, it stays inside.(Michael Sky)"

Don't hold your emotions inside, don't risk your mental and emotional health for appearance. Find what actually makes you happy, and hold onto it.