Happiness Is A Choice

What is happiness? What does it take to be happy? How can I be happy? All those questions I’ve asked myself. Those were times I used to look through my friends’ updates in Facebook and envied their happy pictures. “I wish it could be me in the picture instead of them”: I used to desire.

Why was I so mad and bitter? You might ask. I went to college for 5 years and graduated with an engineering degree. I’m young and minority. Everyone told me that I had everything to get a job right after college. The truth was I didn’t. I felt disappointed. My dreams to help out my parents, as a reward for their effort to support me to go to a foreign college, vanished.

My bitterness started causing problems at home. I was very demotivated; I stopped seeing my friends and spent more time alone, trying to scape from my reality. I got a job that helped me to pay my bills, but the job didn’t cover all my expenses.

Things changed one night that I went to a local campus to visit a friend at the library. It was very late and I was only going to stop by to see her, so I parked where visitors were not allowed to park. What are the chances I will get a parking ticket, I thought? Well, I did! The ticket was for $20 and I cried in my car because I didn’t even have $20 to pay for my ticket. That night, I chose happiness.

The following day, I started looking for jobs. My sadness and bitterness were ending. I found a job in a lab as a temporary employee. One of the questions in my interview was why I was willing to accept a job for 5 months instead of a permanent job? My answer was: there are people who have the blessing to start at the top, but there are others, like me, who take the challenge to start from the bottom and work all the way up until we reach where we want to be.

I looked what I had: a beautiful family who always supported me and was there to cheer me up; friends who loved me and didn’t mind to spend nights praying for each other; and I had my new job in the field I wanted to be.

I started counting my little blessings and realized that I didn’t have a lot, but I had enough to be happy. It was my choice to be happy. There was nobody else who could create happiness for me, other than myself. Happiness is a choice and it only depends on us.