Credit: "A Stone Pathway" by Eve Barrett is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
I like being happy.
Everybody likes being happy. We’re biologically structured to. We get a high from it. Happiness is the best crack you’ll ever have and- bonus- it’s good for you and it won’t kill you! (This is excluding people who have died from laughter, those tragic outliers.)
Technically speaking your unusual if you don’t like being happy. Sadly, just because happiness is good for you and wanted it doesn’t mean it’s there 24/7 or even just the 7.
Think of happiness as a dead beat dad and child support the few passing moments of joy.
I’ve been in active pursuit of happiness ever since I can remember. A firm believer of the phrase Treat Yo’ Self even before it was even a thing.In intermediate school and middle school I would fill journals to the brim with bullet point lists with the title of, “Eve Barrett’s Plan for Success, Happiness, and Cookies” (10 year old Eve loved cookies- I had the nickname Cookie Monster for 3 summers in a row). A list might look like this:
- Go to college (Featuring extensive research of colleges and colorful pamphlets)
- Travel to England (I had a great love for England; it seemed all the novels I read were stationed in that quaint country)
- Eat all the chocolate I want (This is still top 5 of my priorities on any given day)
- Write a novel every summer (I gave up ⅓ of the way every summer)
- Major in Criminal Psychology (I was obsessed with going to college, and I was also obsessed with learning about serial killers)
And finally,
- Change somebody’s life for the better
That last one was on all my lists. It was the bullet point that always stood out from the rest. Maybe because it was the one dream, the one goal that wasn’t excessively about me.
The thought had come to me, believe it or not on the bus when I was in 5th grade. Every morning I would sit down and straight ahead of me was one of those moral stickers people in academia were so fond of. It read in big white letters,
“To the world you may be one person, but to one person you might be the world.”
The words never failed to light my face, but it also made me more meticulous in regard to people. How were they? Was the smile on their face because they were actually happy or because it was a societal muscle reflex?
I would pretend I was Nancy Drew and people’s happiness were my cases:
I heard the way my teachers sighed as they sat down in their desks, the way their mouths would twitch in an attempted smile- no, not good enough- before smile number three stayed- there, perfect- before greeting and settling down their rambunctious class.
I noticed that some of my friends would grimace and stay quiet as others would talk excitedly about their home life. Watched as they twirl their hair as they made up something cool they did during one of the breaks.
I saw my parents’ marriage snap from years upon years of bending. I took in my mother’s crossed arms and hunched back as she dove into her work, and heard my father’s forced laughter ringing in his car that he had to live in when we had our daily calls.
From my observations it occurred to me from a young age that happiness is not easily achieved nor is it easily maintained.
And as I got older people seemed to get sadder. Their shoulders sagging with the weight of the world, and yet they were no Atlas.
My peers and myself struggled through the lapses of puberty, education, and each of our own unique Coming of Age stories.
Once the carefree children that played alongside me in elementary were having nervous breakdowns in class, tear stains a set feature in their face. The bubbling of a child’s laugh turned into an adolescent pained chuckle when someone dryly jokes of taking their life just, so they wouldn’t have to be sitting in class, “because yeah they get it.”
I wanted to change it; to go back to the carefree days. Unfortunately, time travel is still just a thing of science fiction, so I had to do something a bit more practical. I finally had an epiphany sophomore year of high school during study hall.
Truthfully, it was like any other day. My best friend Karina and I would stop by the concession stand and fill up on snacks to munch on during the boring 35-minute space that was study hall. It was during midterms, so everyone had their head down in books. Some studying, others giving up and just drooling in their text books as they snored. As I looked I saw people were stressed out, especially my friends and I wanted to do something that would put a smile back on their faces.
“Karina, do you think you can help me with something?” I swirled in my seat suddenly, surprising Karina, and she stopped the hot cheeto mid way to her mouth.
“With what?” She inquired. I smiled brightly,
“Happy Notes!” I exclaimed.
Happy Notes are little envelopes that say open for happiness in bright colors on the front and on the inside they contain a little note with something funny or nice written on it. The idea had come to me when I was scrolling through Etsy the night before and stumbled upon a product called Happy Pills, where medicine tablets opened up and on the inside were little scrolls of paper that had a compliment written on it. I didn’t want to buy the product for all of my friends, because I was all the way broke, but I decided to create the next big thing.
I enlisted Karina to create the envelopes, while I decorated them and put wrote the funny or nice things on the inside. We made a prototype bunch and during lunch I brought it to my friends. I waited anxiously as they opened it up, and my patience was rewarded as a smile so bright would fill their faces as they would read the note.
“Oh my god, Eve this is so sweet!”
“This made by day.”
“Thank you so much!”
The chorus of thanks range through me and it felt like the biggest win of my life. I continued to make the Happy Notes for my friends through the entirety of my high school career.
However, even heroes have to fall and I found that my own happiness was a fleeting and fleeseable thing during junior and senior year of high school. I was Stressed™:
My lowest low came during fall semester of my senior year. However, surprisingly, not till after I finished all of my college applicants, so I’ll take that as a win. Thank you very much. Everything seemed to go down hill in an increasing order of not coolness- First, I had to go through sessions of grueling, nerve-wracking, and tear producing driving lessons with my dad. Then I got sick- like miss two weeks of school sick, which led to a painful bout of not caring about anything related to school that saw a worrying drop in my grades as I struggled to even pretend to keep up with all the stuff I missed when I was gone, add that to dying every night for the time-consuming well oiled machine that is marching band, and you get goodbye to those senior exemptions for midterms during the fall semester. When I was finally, finally, able to catch up and do some damage control- I got into a car accident! That of course led to not being able use my dominant hand for like the whole month of December, missing my Winter concert for band, definitely not being exempt from finals and having to take all my finals after the long winter break, and who can forget those bouts of depression and failing grades! But eventually, eventually I climbed on top/ ignored it all and went through senior year with a smile on my face as I walked across that graduation stage and away from the hellhole that was high school.
That experience definitely gave me depression whiplash and it was undoubtedly the closet I’ve been to rock bottom in my lifetime. But once you’ve reached the bottom, the only way is up. Or is that just a saying people use to make them feel better about themselves? It makes me feel slightly better about myself, so I’ll keep using it.
This experience also made me treasure happiness even more, and it made me more empathetic to people’s struggles. It bolded, italicized, and indented to me that being happy is great, it’s fantastic, but helping other people achieve that happiness is phenomenal too.
Even though a smile is just a fleeting thing when you manage to put it on someone’s face they’re able to experience happiness even for just a short while, and everyone deserves a chance at happiness. And so, my pursuit of happiness still continues, and I hope that every day is an exploration into the wonders it can bring.
Adena Adams says
I like the part where you talk about dying from laughter