(13, IA, USA) Anonymous - Find Your Happiness
Sometimes you need to find your happiness instead of waiting for it to come to you. Now, I suppose this isn’t always true, but I’m not sure. Something I am sure of is that even if happiness is able to find you, to keep it, you need to find it. This sounds a bit confusing, but if you read the rest of this, I hope it’ll make sense.
Two years ago, one of my friends asked me to join a sport with her. At that time, I only had a few friends because I was genuinely afraid to speak to people. I remember having stomach aches every day before school. Anyway, back to the point, I had thought my friend was crazy. I’d never thought of joining any extracurricular activities or anything. I thought you had to start them young to be good at them. I immediately told her that I wouldn’t join with her. I didn’t want to have to meet all the people on the team or talk to them.
I decided to ask my older sister for advice on what I should do, and she pushed me to try it. I decided that I should. After the first practice, I thought, “This isn’t my thing, after this season I’ll quit.” Then, shockingly, half of the season went by and I found myself enjoying it. I was so much more confident. I was able to speak to people so easily because of the team. In school, I started talking to basically everyone and made lots of friends. I even found myself liking presentations, which if you told that to old me, she wouldn’t believe you one bit.
It was almost like this sport had completely taken my anxiety away. I could finally live my life. I’m not saying you can’t be happy if you have anxiety, but it was so much easier not having to live in fear of doing normal things.
The problem is, the next year I felt that feeling of confidence go away, and the fear of doing normal things was coming back. It didn’t even make sense because I was still in the sport that helped me.
“The next year” that I’m talking about is actually right now. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I wonder if maybe the reason that fear and unhappiness are coming back is that the sport didn’t help me, I helped myself. Yes, joining the sport made me open up, but I was in the sport because I chose to be. I need to start doing new things again and bring that confidence back. I know there are many more new things I could try to get rid of this, and I will. Happiness didn’t find me; I found it, and I will find it again, and so can you. We only live once, so live your life how you want to.
