☺ You Deserve to Be Happy! ☺

I have some good news for you: You Deserve to Be Happy! Yes, You! 

The bad (and sad) news is that most of us don't actually believe we deserve to be happy.

Our lack of this good feeling of deserving to be happy stops us from living life to it's fullest potential. When we feel like we don't deserve to be happy, we place barriers around ourselves that stop the good things from coming in. It makes us cause our relationships and any possible good things that do manage to sneak through to fall apart rather instantly. We start to look for things to go wrong, seeking them out, drawing them out, making them magically appear out of nowhere. It makes us pick fights and get into disagreements with the people we care about. It makes us feel depressed. It keeps us trapped in this terrible bubble that circles over and over until we can actually learn to love ourselves and accept that we do indeed deserve to be happy. 

The reason that most of us don't believe we deserve to be happy is thanks to our insecurities and our general lack of liking and loving ourselves. Society teaches us that to love ourselves is a show of vanity, of being conceded, and this is a bad attitude that needs to halt. Love starts with yourself, you must must must love yourself in order to be happy and in order to love the people and things around you. So, you don't just deserve to be happy, you also deeply greatly do deserve to be loved.

Happiness and love are really one in the same, and both of them start with You. You can't expect to have an abundance, or much at all, of either of these wonderful things if you can't work on yourself and place yourself into a mentality and openness to let them in. 

I don't care what you have been through in your life, I don't care what shitty circumstances might be going on around you, I don't care how badly another person has made you feel about yourself, because, you know what? You are awesome! Despite anything that has happened or will happen in your life, you are awesome! Yes, you! And the more that you believe that, the more you will love life, love yourself, and welcome goods things into your life. You will become an inspiration to those around you and you can fill others up with that same joy because that energy will become so contagious and spill over onto others.  

[photo courtesy: JessicaRoman]

The feeling of not deserving to be happy also comes from being entirely too hard on ourselves for past mistakes and for things that were quite often out of our control, but that we have taken the blame deeply upon ourselves. 

The past is the past, you can't change anything that happened, and the more you try to deny that the longer you will remain in this state of lovelessness. Things happen. To everyone! Taking on the blame doesn't change anything. Carrying that blame around with you will only serve as the chains to your depression and it makes things worse for the ones you love as well. If you want to help others, if you want to help yourself, then choose to be happy, and you do that by making changes and letting go of the past.    

What you need to realize is that almost everyone has gone through some shitty things in their lives. Everyone has done things that they regret, things that they don't feel so good about, things that they deem as "awful" and "unforgivable." So is that where we should stop? Just sit there and wallow in that negativity and just accept that we've done some shitty things, that "god" or the universe, or some holy power has deemed us unfixeable? Or, is it not better to get back up and try again? If you don't like who you are, change it! You get to choose who you are. You get to choose how you are going to live your life. You get to choose whether or not good things can enter your life or not. 

You deserve happiness. Maybe, sometimes life makes you feel like you don't. Maybe sometimes your headspace makes you feel like a bad person, and therefor undeserving of good things. That mentality is the only thing stopping those good things from coming into your life. If you don't open the door, they can't get in! You have to let them in! The door is your bad attitude, so learn to love yourself and then you'll be able to open the door again. Happiness IS within your reach. 

Okay, so maybe it's not as easy as waving a magic wand and going, "Tadaaaa! I love myself! I deserve happiness! Woot woot!" Because, maybe, you just can't let go of that nagging awful mentality that you simply don't deserve good things and that you're not a good person. I've been there, so I know the feeling. Here's the thing; I used to hate myself, I mean utterly despise myself. I was a suicidal, depressed, self-loathing mess for a long portion of my life. You know what changed? I woke up. I started working on myself every single day. I started getting help, reading books, and looking at myself differently. I realized that I could be a person that I was proud of and liked--and loved.  

If you don't feel good about yourself then that's something you must work on everyday. And I mean every day! Every day until life gets easier and you fall in love with your wonderful self (and even after that) you should be doing gratitude practices for yourself. A simple and amazing practice that I still do when life feels rough, and when I may not be feeling so good about myself, is this… get a pen and paper (or I highly recommend having a Happy Diary) and write down a list of all the things you love about yourself. Write down small things, big things, things that you want to be and write them down as if that's who you are already. Write and write until you feel that energy shift within yourself and you genuinely feel better about yourself. Again, you Do get to choose who you are, and if you want to change then this is a good practice to become the greatest version of yourself. Do this practice every morning and every night, or at the very least, once a day. 

You don't have to be miserable forever. You don't have to hate yourself. You have such amazing wonderful unlimited potential inside of yourself and your lack of self love is holding you back from living your life to the fullest and being the amazing person that, deep down inside, you always truly are. It's time to let go of those restricting thoughts and allow that wonderful person inside of yourself to come out and play and smile and be happy.  

So, one more time: You Deserve to Be Happy! 

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