I am going to repeat the title. Happiness will not be handed to you. It took me about 19 years to realize this. I just recently turned 19 years old this past week and I figured out something that was so very important to me. Through the past two years I have been trying to just be happy. I was waiting around, waiting for something to happen that would make me extremely happy. I went through a few trial runs where I thought I was extremely happy, I thought I was content until these trail runs shattered to the ground and I was left with an emptiness feeling. I would spend time alone. I would spend time with my friends and family. I would spend so much time just waiting for happiness. I hoped so dearly that something would just come and make me happy. To put it lightly, this will never happen. On the day of my 19^th birthday I didn’t do much. I went and got my favorite drink, I had a good meal, and I talked to friends that I hadn’t talked to in a while. But the main thing I did was sit and think. I went on a drive for a good hour where I just thought about what made me happy, how I could be happier. I realized that I will never be able to let happiness come to me. I have to find the things that make me happy, the people that make me happy. I thought about all the times that I thought I was happy. When I thought about some of them I was happy again and when I thought about other times they made me sad with the people and emotions that I had lost or let drift away. So was I really happy? I soon realized that the time that I was happy was when I was writing, around good friends, cooking, traveling, and I realized that all those things were completely made up of me. They were things I could do. I didn’t need other people to make me happy. Yes, I could be surrounded with good people who could help build on my happiness but ultimately it was me. I think that a lot of people in our society don’t know this yet. They are constantly looking for someone of something to come up and give them happiness. Whether that be love or kindness from others but I am a realist and sometimes those things don’t help you be happy. I see all of those things as learning experience that will bring you far more emotions than happiness. I wrote this passage on my 19^th birthday when I realized what happiness was to me and I want to share because I don’t want people to hold themselves back trying to find happiness.

The wanting of something to last is a powerful things. The wanting of something to end is even more powerful and brings a lot more sorrow on an everyday basis. The want to not be lost has the most power because most people feel like they can be found. It’s hard to find yourself, find myself, and find others. I guess finding in general. Someone told me once that finding is really easy, simple in fact but people make it complex by mistake. That sense, it is simple, isn’t it? People hope and wish for it to be simple, that life could be handed to them on a silver platter. We all want to be handed things. To be handed happiness. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? People go all of their lives trying to find happiness, to understand it, to let it grow on them. But like I said before it’s not that simple.