Sometimes, late at night, I sit in my window and watch cars speed through the apartment complex. Those nights are the ones in which I find myself unable to sleep. These nights are abundant in quantity. I figure that while my insomnia prevents me from sleeping, I may as well make use of the extra time. In a perfect world, I would spend those nights studying. Instead, I spend a lot of them writing. Writing articles like this, or writing down my thoughts into a little black journal that I’ve had for the last three years. It doesn’t really matter to me what I’m writing; as long as I’m writing.

I think my favorite thing about writing is that it allows you to uncover things about yourself that you may not even have known. For me, writing allows me to find a new side of myself every day. Today, as I sat down to write my daily journal entry I realized that for the first time in a long time; I was happy with myself. Now, the happiness that I saw in between the lines of my scrawling words is not the sort of happiness that has the power to destroy all of the sadness within my soul. This happiness was the sort of happiness that slowly chips away at sadness. The sort of happiness that you can physically feel healing your soul.

I wanted to get to the root of that happiness, I wanted to know exactly what it was so that I would be able to bottle it up for a rainy day. So, I wrote about it. I wrote about the way I felt warmth blossom deep inside my chest and spread throughout my body. I wrote about the way I found myself smiling without even thinking about it. I wrote about all of the people in my life, and that’s when it hit me. The people that God has put into my life, the people who have touched my heart and given me small doses of their own happiness, that are slowly chipping away at the walls that I have built around my heart. It amazes me. It amazes me that someone like me, who isn’t the great at always expressing herself, has been blessed to have so many wonderful people touching my heart every day.

I know Thanksgiving has come and gone, but I am thankful for my friends and family every day of my life. I am thankful for friends of all shapes and sizes, a group of people so diverse that I would have never guessed would mean so much to me. I am thankful for my dysfunctional family, as crazy as they may be; they are my crazies. I’m just so thankful. My heart is so full and I have the amazing people around me to thank for it. I write for you guys, you guys are my inspiration; my whole world.

Thank you.