This is a very cheesy saying but I strongly believe that everyone should follow it. The summer before my senior year I made this my quote to live by. I’m not going to lie and said it made my life a bundle of roses and turned me into happy-go-lucky Mary, but my life definitely has improved. I had been surrounding myself with people that were bringing me down and holding me back, I wasn’t reaching my full potential. It was that summer that I had made friends that wanted to hang out with me, they never made funny, and I was a happier person around them. A lot of my old friends saw this as me choosing my new friends over them, which I probably was but I had to, I was just happier this way. I had to let the people go who were a detriment to my happiness. They were not letting me be happy, I was happy with my new friends, not because they were new but because they seemed to genuinely care about me. If I tweeted something they took noticed to see if I was okay, I didn’t have to ask for help, they offered. I was slowly becoming friends with people who were actually there for me and didn’t hold me back, and I began to see what real friends were, and that’s really when I started using this quote in my life more and more.
Many times breaking these old friendships was very hard. My best friend for the longest time was really more of a detriment to my happiness than anything. After my crush on him passed I realized that our friendship had been built around my feelings for him. I no longer found him cute or funny when he was making fun of me, rather I found it insulting. Since I no longer put him on a pedestal like I had for so long, he began treating me as less than the person I was (does that make sense? I don’t know), and he may have been doing this longer than I noticed just because I was head-over-heels for him. For the first time in almost two years I stood up to him and we had our first fight, and last. However this also opened my eyes to new people, I began talking to new people (who would still break my heart) and I let myself branch out and talk to people he normally wouldn’t have permitted because of their different beliefs. I no longer had my best friend, but his place was quickly filled. This quote helped me push past a horrible person. I no longer miss him, or miss the person I thought he was, but I miss the time that I spent trying to please him and trying to get him to notice me and fall for me like I had fallen for him. I was happier without him.
Doing more of what makes me happy has made me a happier person in the long run, and really changed my senior year. People that I had been friends with told me that I shouldn’t do a graduation speech, but I did one and rocked it because it made me happy. I stopped doing things that most people my age didn’t like crochet, carry a briefcase, making videos, and blogging because that’s what made me happy.
This quote has also inspired me to think about everything I do. That’s why my major is no longer communications or going to be political science major because that isn’t what’s going to make me happy. What’s going to make me happy is a rewarding career in Global Studies where I can go abroad and help people, rather than do something that is going to make my parents happy. If I lived in a perfect world (which I don’t) this is what I would do for a career travelling the world, but that my friends is impractical. Now you may be thinking “Mary, why aren’t you doing communications then?” Well, the people that are communication majors are often quite assholes, not all of them, but most are. They are very competitive and very full of themselves and those aren’t the kind of people that I want to surround myself with for the next 50+ years of my life. I’d rather surround myself with happy people who love and serve others, and that way I can still do this also, well that is if I’m still doing this in four years (I hope I am).
I encourage everyone to live by this more because really you aren’t going to get the most out of life if you aren’t doing what is making you happy. This is something I wish I would’ve taken to heart a long time ago so I would have saved so much time and energy on people that were holding me back because I spent so much time trying to please them rather than myself. If you really look at life in the schema of everything you have about 75-80 years and you have to make the most of every single moment. As hard as it get sometimes (and believe me it does get hard) we really have to try and be happy. One of my favorite songs is by Secondhand Serenade, “A Twist in My Story has a really good lyric which is *clears throat* “Slow down the world isn’t watching us break down, it’s safe to say we are alone now, we’re alone now,” and I think this ties in perfectly. You have the time to break down and the world isn’t going to watch you fail. Everyone goes on, nobody’s waiting for you to fail, so if you fail while you’re happy it doesn’t matter. Just do what you need to do to be happy because what really matters is your happiness and if other people are bringing you down they probably aren’t worth your time or energy. So a message from Mary: Let’s try to be happy together!
XOXO
Mary