For fifteen years I didn’t know what happiness was. I thought happiness was long blonde hair, perfect white teeth, tan legs, clear skin, a good body, perfect grades and anything else that made me feel better about myself. I based my happiness on looks, only leading me to realize that I would never be completely satisfied. I spent hours on end sitting in front of the mirror, trying to achieve the highest level of “perfection” that I was striving for. No amount of makeup could conceal the way I felt I looked. No fake smile could cover up the way I was feeling. I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t and justified it with wanting to “fit in”. Even though I thought I was okay, I didn’t realize that for the longest time, I was only hurting myself. I felt like an oddball and an outcast for my strong political and religious beliefs and thought something was wrong with me when society wouldn’t accept me for who I was. In my head, I was doing everything right. I had a good group of friends, maintained high grades, went to church every Sunday, did my devotions at night, helped anyone who needed it. I thought I was trying to make myself happy and failing, but I was fulfilling everyone else’s needs and not my own. I was lost and needed to find myself.

I’ve been hurt. I’ve experienced deaths of close relatives one too many times for me to feel like I shouldn’t be consumed with fear and indulged in my own tears. I can pinpoint the very moment when I realized that it was time for a change. It was about 9:45 on a Monday night in February, and I had just gotten in the car to drive home from my youth group, KLIFE. A male small group leader whom I had never developed a personal relationship with was speaking for the last 30 or so minutes of the evening. Going into youth group that night, my heart had become overwhelmed with anxiety about both the future and the past and I couldn’t bring myself to focus on the present, but just when I needed it most, my heart was restored in a way I never thought possible. From that point forward, I started searching for myself. Who am I? I drew a blank every time I asked myself that very question. I obviously wanted to make myself happy, but I still wasn’t sure what happiness was. I started by searching for things that caused me to smile, like sunsets, hammocking and working out with friends. Sure, to this day, these are things I continue to use as a source of comfort, but I finally realized my deepest desires of true peace come from one perfect and almighty source, God.

I began to surround myself with people that encourage me to be a better version of myself daily and direct me towards Christ. For the first time in a long time, I felt genuinely happy. Of course, I still have my moments of anxiousness where the problems of this world seem so much bigger than they really are, but I’ve found my only permanent solution. I’m still working on my happiness and I most definitely don’t have it all figured out, but I’m putting the pieces together and learning to love myself as He loves me.

I still don’t know how to define happiness because I now know that it’s completely different from person to person. One thing I know for sure is that happiness is not perfection. Happiness is finding yourself and what makes you happy, because how could someone be happy if they can’t figure out what makes them happy in the first place? Today, I wear makeup because it makes me feel good. I wear my dad’s sweatshirts with leggings on occasion because it makes me happy. I surround myself with the people that make me happy. I write because it makes me happy. I sing because it makes me happy. I stopped worrying about how everyone else sees me and my choices and it opened another new world of possibilities.