Turn to Yourself

Too many people I care about dearly have been feeling abused by their lives. They’ve been feeling unhappy, and extremely helpless with no control of the circumstances causing their unhappiness. This is for you if you feel this way.

Nothing feeds unhappiness as much as feeling helpless. Every time you take a look around yourself and think there is nothing I can do, you are choosing to solidify your sadness. I understand that your life is horrible, I understand that your circumstances are making you miserable. I can see clearly how it is not your fault that any of what is happening is happening, and that you cannot stop it from punching and kicking at you. But here is my question to you; what if your life never gets better? What if you continue being patient and waiting on life to stop abusing you, and instead all it does is move from kicking to cutting, and from cutting to stabbing? What happens then?

Will you spend your entire life being miserable? Will you carry that stone sitting on your chest for the rest of your life? Will your heart always be heavy, will your mind forever remain shackled by life’s abuse?

I want you to close your eyes and think for a single moment. I want you to think of everything happening in your life, and you will find that we always have a choice. The choice may be horrible, between two things each worse than the other –but the choice is always ours. We can choose to quit and live the misery of being without a job, with no money and no hope for it, or we can choose to stay at our dreadful jobs where a sliver of hope exists. We can choose to surrender to the beating, or we can choose to fight back and get hurt. There is always a choice, stop robbing yourself of that truth. You are in control, and when offered the choice between bitter and sour you chose which one you will withstand.

You are not helpless. Life happens the way it happens and sometimes we cannot help what is being thrown at us, but that does not make us helpless. God granted us the gift of ultimate control, he granted us the very weapon we can use against life’s abuse, but we choose not to use it. We are raised to believe happiness comes from without. Happiness is money, a present, it is travel, a smooth ride, new things, games, friends, family, good food –happiness is a good life. None of that is true. I dare you to bring forth a single person, whose life you actually know all the details of, and tell me their life is perfect. A perfect life does not exist. Just as ever present light does not exist. Our world was created on the very basis of opposites co-existing. Life is chaotic, it is a neverending gamble full of ups and downs. So stop expecting the world to grant you the impossible, stop expecting your life to suddenly turn around and go from bad to good just because you were patient. I can tell you right now that that will never happen.

Use what God gave you, that weapon he embedded in all our minds, the one rusting away in a corner under a pile of false beliefs. Take control of your own self. You have the power that no other creature was born with, the power of a mind strong enough to override itself. You have the power to rewrite your expectations, the power to take a step back and actually see who you are and edit every single aspect of yourself. You cannot force life to bend to your will, but by God you can bend your mind to your will and force it to find happiness amidst your misery.

Accept that patience is not the answer, waiting for things to get better is not the way to find happiness. You find what you look for in life, if you are waiting for things to get better so you can be happy, then all you will find are the bad things that are robbing you your joy. Shut life out, take a day and be with your mind and find your happiness in there. Happiness is hope against doubt, it is a smile bursting among the tears. Happiness is possibilities, it is dreams and an imagination, happiness is taking life as it comes while you work for the life you want. Happiness is comfort, it is faith, it is taking control of yourself and celebrating inside achievements, it is working to improve your life and yourself –whether those improvements pay off or not. Happiness is, above all else, nothing but acceptance. Accepting life’s imperfections, accepting that our choices are difficult ones, accepting that bad is a part of good.

My life was in ruins for years, and the day I decided to stop fixating on my life and fixate on my own self instead was the day my life got better. If I choose to, I can still see how none of it has been truly fixed, the negatives plaguing  my past still exist, and yet all I see is positives. No one found happiness by looking for it outside, no one found it by trying to create it in their lives. It can only be found by working on your insides, and when you are fixed you will see that while you were busy within yourself, your without got busy getting fixed.