How I Became Happy

As my time at university is coming to an end, I've been reflecting a lot on my life recently. How my life has been in the past, how my life currently is, and how I hope to live my life in the future. When considering how university has shaped me into who I am today, I've come to realise how happy and positive I've been over these past few months. I don't want to sound melodramatic, but happiness was something that I really struggled with as a teenager. I had the world's happiest childhood which I am ridiculously grateful for (thanks, mum and dad!), but when I became a teenager something must've happened in my brain which meant that I reeeeaaallly struggled to be happy. I don't know why and I don't know how. To put it simply: I was miserable.

However, recently, I've been feeling like my old self again. The self I was when I was a child, when I was smiley and happy. Little things don't agitate me anymore. I've found myself noticing my cheeks and jaw aching from the amount of smiling I've done. I don't know why my perspective on life has suddenly changed, but I think I just woke up one morning and decided not to give a crap anymore about life stressors. I've had a whole new sense of awareness that in a world containing billions of people, I am one extremely fortunate person. My life so far has been free from distraught and terror. I'm in such a lucky position to even say that I'm a university student. And thinking about how lovely my home-life is with my family makes me feel like one of the luckiest people alive.

I've found that the key to happiness (for me, anyway) is gratitude. To always be grateful. Each time I have a problem, I always know that it could be worse. And for that, I am grateful. 

Everyone's life will have bad parts. Everyone will deal with these bad parts differently. But to be almost 21 and to have had no traumatic bad parts - well that's pretty damn lucky. 

I'm learning more about myself every single day, even if it's only little things like how I really don't like wholewheat pasta. Each experience that life brings me teaches me something new about myself. I'm in an extremely happy place in my life right now, and I feel more 'me' than ever. I thought it would be nice to document this and blog about it so that in the future, if I am ever in an unfortunately negative mindset again for prolonged periods of time, I can come back to this post and try to learn how to be happy again.

Thank you for reading this, and I am extremely sorry that this is my first post in 2018. Third year of uni has been busy, but I'm near the end now and I know that I'll have some more free time soon.

What can you do to make yourself happy? Make that a priority.

-bunnydiver.