Failure to find happiness by Alexis

Failure to find happiness by Alexis - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

Happiness is usually the main thing people want, and over the years it is was all I ever longed for. For years, I was lost when it came to my happiness and the need to feel complete. I have struggled a great deal to find my happiness, looking in places where I noticed people usually found it. My search for happiness focused on the search for friendships, love, and self-worth. These were all of the things I believed would fulfill me as much as they seemed to fulfill others. I had a lot to learn about the and myself.

Through my pursuit of friendship, I opened myself up to people I should have kept myself stored away from. Trust was easily given and loyalty was always kept; but only on my part. Do not get me wrong, there were some friends worth keeping, but there were many that were never worth fighting for. I spent majority of my youth and recent years fighting to keep people in my life despite them showing me their true colors. I assumed that they played a part in my happiness, but I was wrong. It was not until recently that I realized that the need for friends was not essential to my growth of happiness.

My next focus was love. I did not care much for the love of my peers but more so for the love of a companion. My first relationship was at the age of fifteen, and it lasted four years on and off. He was my first love and I spent much of my time trying to find a love like his in others after we officially split. I feel that’s where I went wrong; trying to force an old happiness into every relationship I had following my first. Love was my focus, but an old love was what I wanted. Once I understood I would not find that love again, I was open to just any love. I got to the point that my happiness was now in the hands the guy I loved at the moment, whether he love me or not. My self-worth was no longer thought of due to the false happiness I produced in my relationship. It took a while for me to acknowledge my wrong doings.

Over the past three to four months I began to separate myself from the things I sought out to make myself happy, and I decided to focus on myself completely. I would sit in my room for hours evaluating myself and my life choices. The idea was to look deeper into myself to grasp what is was that kept me smiling all of these years, and it was me. My happiness was surrounded around me and I had failed to realize it.

As I thought about the things I thought made everyone else happy, I realized that before those things made them happy, they made themselves happy first. It took some time, but I now know that to be happy with other things in life you first have to be happy with yourself. Happiness comes from within and everything else is just an add on to that happiness. To focus mainly on things other than yourself for happiness would not provide happiness at all. I am just happy that I now know to look to myself to feel complete.