Being truly happy means refusing to surrender yourself to every bad mood. You recognize your behavioral patterns, right? You should know by now that you have triggers, which can send you off to a gnarly shame spiral. We ARE old enough to know better. It’s not like we’re sixteen and putting our fingers into light sockets just to see how it will feel. When we were in high school, it felt good to hurt because our lives were usually so dull that at least it meant something was happening. Being depressed was preferable to being bored. Now things have changed. Life is too busy and, quite frankly, too real for us to fall and not get up.

You know those blessed days when you wake up feeling high on life… and nothing else for once? You wake up one day with the stars aligned and all of sudden you’re that asshole who’s skipping down the street listening to LCD Soundsystem on your iPod grinning ear-to-ear. Your life seriously feels like the beginning of some horrible upbeat Hollywood movie and you are O B S E S S E D with it. You are on that Kate Hudson opening montage of a rom-com tip. Guess what though? This kind of moment can be fleeting. Before you know it, you’re experiencing the sad part of the rom-com, listening to Adele and crying in some diner. In order to avoid everything Adele-related though, we have to realize that happiness is not a given. We can’t be living la vida rom-com every second, so when we DO wake up happy for no particular reason, you gotta grab it and hold on for dear life. Keep the momentum going. I feel like when people are in a good mood, they are always expecting some sort of crash. Because you can’t be in a good mood for a long period of time, right?! In a few days, you have to go to your Sad appointment with Adele. You have no choice! To experience any kind of high, we have to hang with the lows. Um, yeah, this is BS. No you don’t.

Something I’ve come to recognize in myself is that I LOVE to feel melancholy for no reason. Sometimes I want nothing more than just to turn on some Broken Social Scene (Feel Good Lost era because it is such an appropriate title) and just OD on my vague sadness. I don’t know why I like to do this so much. I mean, it was cute when I was 19 and suffering from severe cystic acne and hated all my friends but it honestly makes no sense now that I’m in my mid-twenties. When I do it now, it feels like I’m playing with fire. I used to be able to bounce back from my bad moods in a hot minute and be like “OMG JK, I love life again!” but that doesn’t happen anymore. Now when I go into that Broken Social Scene #dark place, I can get stuck there for days. And you know what sucks? It’s all my fault! I opened that door, so I can’t act shocked when I’m unable to get out.

I know this all sounds super self help-y. You have to forgive me. I just read Bethenny Frankel’s HILARIOUS (in a bad way obvi) book, A Place Of Yes and I think she’s momentarily possessing my mind, body and spirit. Ew, sick. GET OUT! Anyway, I say all of this now and I’ll probably be googling Sylvia Plath quotes in a week but whatever, just bear with me for a second. Being truly happy, to me, is a choice you have to make. I wasn’t aware of this before. I thought happiness, like dying, was a guarantee but, oops, it’s not. It involves hard work and not succumbing to the attractive lure of melancholy. This is no easy feat though. Telling your friends that you’re in a bad place and falling into a Netflix k-hole feels like the BEST thing sometimes but it will eventually catch up with you. Years will pass and you’ll find yourself in a perma k-hole, which is not chic. Get out now! Be more proactive with managing your moods and for the love of god, burn that stupid Adele CD.

Absolutely love this. Brb, burning Adele CD.

(Source: thoughtcatalog.com)

There are two types of fear.  Emotion that keeps us alive.  Fear of falling.  Fear of bears.  Fear of the mysterious man with a dark hoody walking a little too fast.  Then there is the other type of fear, emotion that keeps us dead. Fear of failing.  Fear of what ifs.  Fear of what others will think.  We already have the first type of fear.  It comes standard.  The other is an option, a very expensive one.  It may cost you your life. If you want to live, stop being afraid.

- Angry

(Source: theangrytherapist)

“I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it, but I didn’t, not really. Only the smudgeness of it; the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it. I didn’t realize it would sometimes be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea. Because it’s the halves that halve you in half. I didn’t know, don’t know, about the in-between bits; the gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me.”