Are you happy?

“What makes me happy?”

As a graduate this is probably a question you have been asking yourself for at least the past 3-4 years, and probably most intensely these days, after you have left what was your home for the past years, after you have thrown that hat at graduation, seen your friends again, maybe it was the last time you were all in one place.

“What makes me happy?” I consider this a very important question. I didn’t always, there was a time when I thought: “What is going to bring money to my bank account?” was the most important question. Of course it’s not.
Don’t worry, this is not going to be a ” Just find what makes you happy and be great at it.”- kind-of-post.
“What makes me happy?” I consider this a very important question but it’s not the question I build my life upon.
So welcome to a post about my theories on happiness, what life is about and how you should choose what you want to do in life.

There were times in my life when I was very happy. I had just moved to Berlin, I lived with my boyfriend at the time and I just started my university course in Pharmacy (yes, I know). This went on for about 2,5 years and looking back at the time, I hardly remember it, it wasn’t a very significant time in my life, I didn’t learn anything, not a thing.
And you might not agree, or you might not want to hear this but I believe that this is what happiness does to you. It makes you content, it makes you lazy and it stops you from growing.

I believe life has to offer many things, I always imagine it like a scale, happiness at the top and unhappiness at the bottom and all the things in-between.

Happiness looks like this:

You see what happens? If this is what you feel like for most of your life, you will have missed all the other places and things that life has to offer. You’ll always ever have seen one side, you will die not knowing what else is there, you will have missed most things.

What I want my life to look like is this:

I want to experience everything, I want to be so happy in a way that I think I can’t take anymore, I want to be so sad that I don’t feel like I can breathe and I want everything in between. I always imagine it like a cake, if I had a chocolate cake with a peanut butter and vanilla topping, why would I only want to eat the vanilla topping and not the peanut butter or the chocolate?

Of course no one in life is ever only happy and life throws this curve balls into our days anyway, if we want it or not.
But I still observe most people strive to be happy and for a long time I too thought the purpose of everything is happiness but since I realised that happiness is a feeling that comes and goes, it has taken away a lot of pressure and it has helped me to find what I want to do in life.

I didn’t choose theatre because it makes me happy, I chose theatre because it’s hard, it’s difficult, it makes me angry, it outrages me, it fills me with more joy than anything I have ever known, it makes me sad and depressed, it offers me everything life has to offer. In theatre I can experience the whole variety of things there are.

And if you’re about to go to University, if you’re already a student, if you’re a graduate or if you have been working for 20 years my advice to you would be: Don’t look for happiness, don’t wait for it, go out and look for the thing that for you represents all the things, places and feelings that life has to offer.

Ask yourself: “What makes me sad and happy at the same time? What is hard and joyful? What makes me so angry that I could explode and so happy that I can’t wait to get up in the morning?”

If you find that thing, in your professional or your private life, I can tell you it’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be as easy, as flowery and shiny as happiness.
It might result in you living in many different countries, it might result in you being in a relationship so intense that it takes away the ground underneath your feet for years, it might result in you going back to University, studying, presenting, writing,it could be anything.
I have done and experienced all that and I know it’s going to be hard but I also know that you’re going to stop looking for happiness, you’re going to stop waiting for the day you are 67 and you can finally give up that crappy job of yours and begin your life, you’ll accept sadness and anger as something that makes you richer, teaches you something. You can accept it because you know you have found this one thing in your life that is going to bring you the biggest joy you’ve ever experienced anyway, because it always does.

And then, if you’re anything like me, or maybe you don’t even have to be anything like me, you’ll hope that at the end of your days you’ll look back and say :” I know life and I have seen it all.”, and tell me, what else could we possibly want from this life?

Christina

(image credit: http://littlegreenbow.com/)