Happy to Sad in moments

Self-reflection is a great quality to have yet sometimes it can be a destructive force in your life if you are unable to be honest with yourself. We must always take care in self-reflection because the range of human emotion is not without merit and most take it for granted. I am not a scholar nor do I have an expensive degree that says I’m better then most. I am just a normal everyday Liberal who cares about reaching peace within himself. Respectively, if you hold one of those degrees kudos to you! But I digress. The line of love and hate is so fine sometimes we aren’t even sure where we stand. In this Hub I am going to try to explore my thoughts on the sadness in being happy. I am sure that it will become more then that, as my writings sometimes take a life of their own and I just have a feeling this is going to be one of those writings.

I sometimes find myself wondering about the reality of true happiness. In my most confused emotional moments, in which we all find ourselves sooner or later, I seem to understand the purity of it more. My friends when growing up asked me many times why I choose to write music with such a depressive state of mind, of course I was a teenager and I am sure that had much to do with it, but that was not it fully. I had an erratic childhood. My parents for what it’s worth did what they could but we all have our limitations and I have come to terms with that. I was distraught, headstrong and in the midst of insanity. Compared to how I felt things should or shouldn’t have been. I think that I look at happiness as a state of mind that is always moving. As a teenager I wanted to achieve bliss, The perfect comfort of happiness, but I found that they are two very different things. I don’t speak of them as different in a text book way or even as a scientific way but as in a flowing of emotion. We can not look at happiness as a black and white ordeal. The achievement of bliss is what we tend to mistake as happiness. This I fear is the downfall we seem to fall into most of the time. If we think of Happiness as a flowing and always changing state we can then grasp onto the thought that Bliss can only be reached when you accept happiness even in your weakest or saddest moments. Hence my statement the sadness in being happy.

It is my belief when we strive for happiness that in that attempt to achieve bliss we tend to become overcome in sadness instead. I know from my own life that the road is a trap in and of itself. Many times we fill our need for this through consumerism and having a goal of a certain status. These things are not inherently bad and if achieved or done in the proper mind state can help in bringing that bliss closer. On the other hand the fault in these actions can be easily brought out by greed and the attempt to replace and forget things that have yet to be dealt with. The goal in always looking into yourself is to achieve happiness where in the worst of times you can still look at life as an accomplishment and this in turn will bring you to the understanding of bliss.

In my attempts to reach out for happiness I have failed many times. When I was younger I reached out for my parents to be more perfect. To be more like the image of parents that my mind told me they should be. In my relationships during this time I shifted that need to the need to feel perfect in love. Then in my 1^st marriage I turned that need of perfect love into a cage for myself. I didn’t get what I felt was perfect from my parents and family growing up so I made it my mission to do so in my marriage. So I gave myself at every turn for the happiness of the marriage and the family I created but instead it was something else. I will not demonize my ex in this post because this is a self-reflection piece. Instead I will speak of what I did wrong. I won’t use the “we were young” excuse because in my opinion that is bull****. Now on my failings I can say in my attempt to be happy I made a number of bad moves. In the beginning I was selfish. I was in college and the future was the most important thing to me. I was under fire to quit school and did not want to. I had a part time job that brought in 200 a week but it was not enough for her or her parents. My fault in the matter was not wanting to work overnights because I didn’t want to give up time with my daughter and I had trust issues. So I quit school instead. Throughout the 6 years I was married I Let that failure and the fact that I was unable to pursue music send me into a battle to own and buy. We wanted a house, a new car and nice things. I went along with it. I was dieing inside. The search for happiness turned on me and I became depressed. In the end, my depression and her disappointment in my choices and her love of lets just say “freedom” destroyed us. I let the depression and the disappointment in myself blind me. What I really was looking for was unattainable bliss not happiness.

Since the divorce I have realized that in all my soul searching I had left out the biggest truth, acceptance. I did not accept that I had to work harder. That I had to be silent at times and completely truthful at others. I did not accept that my life was going to be different then what I dreamed it would be. I know these things are simple but as the saying goes we don’t see the forest even though it is right in front of us. I began the healing process and it has brought me here. I have left out a lot of what happened in the past because it is not the past that I am looking to. My acceptance of these failings has made me realize many things.

This road we all walk to find happiness is elusive and until we see that it is a flowing emotion and that the perfect bliss is not the key to happiness we shall never be rid of the sadness in happiness. I realized that we must flow with it, accept the sadness and even embrace it. Accept and embrace the anger. Accept these thoughts and feelings as one big road to bliss. Learn, accept and change. This is the flow of happiness without sadness. I know we will have our days of pain but the choice is yours to look at your loved ones, family, friends and passer-bys the next day and know your happy with who you are.