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Happy Day

Thursday, 24th March 2016

What makes you happy? How you can create more happiness in the world around you?
Those were the questions asked during passing International Day of Happiness, celebrating joy of living and gratitude towards others.

Trade followed many campaigns over last couple of weeks; this one particularly caught our attention. Could every day be a happy day?
Our blogger thought this about happiness:

Happy International Happiness Day!

It's with some irony that I wish happiness upon you, because I have a strong dislike of being encouraged to be happy. That isn't to say I don't enjoy being happy, I love it! Happiness by its very nature is a lovely thing, an enjoyable emotion. But chocolate cake is also a good thing, and I don't want to be forced to eat that either.

So, yeah ok, perhaps I have a stronger reaction to being told what to feel that others might, I grew up in a house where it wasn't ok for me to express not being happy. While the adults around me swooped from one extreme emotion to the other, I was rewarded for a smile and punished for anything else. At special events like birthday's and Christmas it was utterly unacceptable to have any expression other than a smile, not matter how fake. For me, this constant denial of emotions, (or possibly more damagingly, the creation of fake emotions, fake happiness), meant that I was never sure if I was actually happy. Decisions I made were skewed as I was unaware which thought or feeling reflected what I actually wanted. My whole personality, as the person that was both outward facing and inward facing to myself in my head, had been constructed to what someone else wanted of me and it was bloody confusing.

I was so drowned in the emotional manipulation that even though I eventually surfaced and realised what I've gone through, I've found I'm still shaking the dregs off years later. In some ways I view myself as lucky, because as a survivor I know what emotional abuse looks like and I try damned sure to make sure I don't have it in my life. I check myself regularly to make sure that I'm not emotionally manipulating others (it would be easier to get what I want, I learned all the tricks growing up!) and I try to make sure I'm not on the receiving end. On the other hand though, I do get tetchy about being told what to feel.

So what does all this have to do with International Happiness Day? Only this, you can't make other people happy. Heck, you can't even force yourself to be happy! All you can do (and this is the important bit) is create space where happiness has a chance to grow. For me, I think this mainly involves allowing people to be their true and authentic selves, to love and to live as they wish to. I think if everybody had this opportunity then the world would be a better place. But, those are pretty big asks for just one day, so there are other things you can do of course; laughter, friendship and music all fertilise the happiness field (well there's an image!) and feeling loved certainly helps. 

So, I retract my wish for you to have a happy International Day of Happiness and instead I wish you to have many opportunities for happiness to happen (without any pressure if they don't).

Jack Davis

 

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