What does it mean to be happy? For the past seven years of my life, I was positive that being happy meant controlling and suppressing every negative emotion that I could have. In the last three years of my college career, I have only let myself get legitimately angry twice. Granted, I get annoyed more frequently, but those feelings would only last for minutes. The last time that I have held a grudge towards someone was in middle school, and the last time I let myself be sad for more than a few hours was the second time one of my very close friends passed away. You must be thinking to yourself, “Wow Brandon! You must be such a happy person.” Truthfully, I was only ever getting by.
In the past year, I have learned much about myself and how I operate as a person. Something that I learned is that in order to be positive, you have to let yourself be negative. Every time I took a sub-positive emotion and forced it into something good, I was putting on a façade. This is not to say that I am not a happy person. I do believe that I am genuinely positive and happy the majority of the time. I believe that by not letting myself experience the negatives in life, I was not able to get the full effect of happiness whenever a positive situation arose.
Imagine negative, neutral and positive emotions on a spectrum. On this hypothetical spectrum, imagine that you can only move in one direction as much as you can move in the opposite direction. What this means is that you will only be able to feel as positive as you let yourself feel negative. This definitely does not mean that one has to be negative 50% of the time and positive 50% of the time. It means that if, as I did, one suppresses all of their unhappy emotions, that person would be unable to attain a higher level of happiness.
In the last almost five years, I have lost four incredibly important people in my life, the fourth being just eleven months ago. I find it hard to control my emotions when an important protagonist in a movie is killed, or even when I have a fleeting thought about my friends’ deaths. I would take all of that sadness that I had in my heart, bundle it up, put in a box, shove that box into the deepest recesses of my mind, and covered it with a thin sheet of positivity. What I wish I had known before the last six months was that this was effectively severely hindering the relationships I was creating with the people around me. I was never able to connect with people on a deeper emotional level because I hated that feeling of negativity, so I never risked letting it happen. I refused to put myself in any state of vulnerability in order to protect my precious positive emotions. Clearly, this is not the way to live any sort of healthy emotional life.
As it turns out, it is perfectly normal to feel sad, upset, and, dare I say it, even mad sometimes. In fact, I would now argue that it is even better for your mental state. Whether it is yelling into a pillow, venting to your friends, or sobbing during a sad part of a movie, just let yourself feel. Do not lock those emotions up inside yourself like I did, it will only give you a false sense of positivity that will only come back to bite you. In the end, happiness is not about being happy 24/7. If you know anyone that is happy that much except for Chris Traeger from "Parks and Recreation," they are probably a robot. In the end, do not be afraid of your emotions.
Live, cry, laugh, yell and, most of all, be happy…
