There has not been an exact moment or an event in my life that has impacted it the most. However, the lessons I have learned over time have helped me improve my life. I think your mindset and outlook on life is the most important thing; more important than a person’s situation.
People who have had the most tragedies in their life can be happier than rich people. A person’s happiness is an important thing because there is no point in doing something that will not make you happy. This is one of the main reasons that people become depressed or go through a mid-life crisis.
Lessons
The key advice, knowledge, and lessons that I learned are the following. Happiness is not a destination, it’s a journey. You cannot love anyone else before you love yourself. You have to fill your cup before you can fill other people’s cups.
Therapy only works unless you do the work, and no one can do the work for you. Only you can make yourself happy. It is not an automatic quick fix. You may feel worst leaving than when you arrive after every session, you won’t feel better. And that’s okay, you will feel better over time.
Happiness is a journey and not a destination, which means that bad days don’t define you. It is only a minor setback in your journey to happiness, and tomorrow is a new day. Let go of that bad day from yesterday and try to make today a good day. You cannot expect every single day of your life to be great, is not realistic.
The next one is a little controversial, which is that you have to love yourself before others can love you. In the past, I did not believe this was true because lots of people loved me when I did not love myself. Now that I love myself, I see how this saying is true.
A lot of that comes from one of my best friends in the past and how thinks he does not deserve love and does not love himself. But I will not go into further detail about that because this isn’t his story.
Growth
I struggled with not filling my cup before filling other people’s cups. Which I still sometimes struggle with because happiness is a journey, but I have definitely gotten better at it.
I used to think putting myself first was selfish, but I now know it is not. You cannot help others when you aren’t helping yourself because you will burn out.
I am the person that my friends go to vent to and for advice. Being an empath resulted in taking in all of this negative energy and wondering why I was feeling down. I was helping people with their mental health when I was struggling with mine. I have a habit of letting my emotions bottled up.
Therapy helps you get better because you get the opportunity to fully express yourself without holding back. Which will eventually make you feel freer and lighter; it will help you process this emotion instead of bottling it all up. I used to think that going to therapy wasn’t helping because I kept talking about issues, but talking about it isn’t going to help fix or change things.
But it will help me get over it and not get stuck in my feelings. Which is how you can become depressed. You cannot control the things that happen to you, but you can choose how you respond and your feelings towards it. You can let something define you and control your life, or embrace it and move on.
Once I learned these lessons and applied them to my life, I have been the happiest I have ever been.
By Brynn Walker
Featured image courtesy image of Kirk Johnson’s Flickr page – Creative Commons License
Inset image courtesy image of Esparta Palma’s Flickr page – Creative Commons License
