I love who I am right now. Or rather, I love who I am – in general, and you know what? I am happy.
Happiness has been a controversial emotion throughout my life. What is happiness? I attempted to define happiness in order to achieve it. I attempted to wipe out all emotion, to avoid its opposite. But life isn’t about avoiding. You can run from your parents, you can run from your friends, you can run from any form of outside authority, but the one entity you can’t run from is yourself.
The latter part of the above paragraph is a cliché. The kind of thing you see on Facebook. The common quotes you see graffitied on city walls and plastered on the back of the many cars populating an already overpopulated world. The kind of so-called rubbish found on the bumper stickers of your ‘average everyday normal guy’ (Jon Lajoie. Check out the song!). Think about it though. What is a cliché? A cliché has been defined as a ‘trite or obvious remark’ (Princeton). When people hear clichés, they immediately switch off, allowing the remark to go in one ear and out the other. It wasn’t until now that I realised how stupid that is. Clichés may be obvious, they may be overused, but that in no way hinders their legitimacy.
All my life I’ve been influenced by what this person thought, and what that person thought. I sought to discover the justifications behind their opinions of me and mold myself according to their criteria. That, however, has reached its conclusion. Most people wallow in the grey area of being swayed by external influences, but you know my extremities and I, I could never wallow in the grey area of anything. The all or nothing person I am leaped from being invisibly puppeted by society, to not puppeteering society, but ignoring society and puppeteering myself. Finally I’ve come to terms with the fact that truly to change the world one must start with themselves. All that ‘starting with the man in the mirror’ bs does have some validity to it. Set an example and others will follow. No one follows hypocrites of their own will.
Happiness truly resides in coming to terms with oneself.
