Someone once said to me that to be happy in life you need to do the things that make you happy.
That's not really true.
As far as I can tell from my eighteen years of living and my however many years of independent decision making, you have to do things that make you really sad/angry/hysterical/belong to the bottom of the social heap sometimes. You can't just skip school, eat sweets, get dolphins tattooed around your belly-button in full colour or hit that girl in the face. These things may make you happy, but if the end result is a fat kid with a weeping stomach wound that just keeps growing because the kid keeps getting fatter and is on the brink of getting her very own prison cell next to her parents who were put there because their child never attended any form of education, well... happiness may not be on the cards for you.
Recently, I gave up on writing. I stopped writing stories, which I used to love to do, and I stopped writing blogs. Actually, the blog thing stopped because I felt I had nothing to write. Then I got into my writing funk and the blogs never resumed. I'm not sure what started the writing funk but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with this day that I was sitting at Uni and people were talking about what careers they wanted to go into. Most of them didn't know, but some of them did, and while they told me I thought to myself, "you're never going to do that. Seriously... you're never in freaking class." So, although I do differ from the lecture ditchers, I started to wonder about my own 'dreams', if that's not too corny a word to use. No it definitely is. Ah, I'm going to use it anyway.
So I started thinking; what if I never get a book published? I've always been pretty sure that I would, because I've never thought any different. One day I was going to write a story, and have it published. Over time that became a book that wasn't very well-known and got me no income what-so-ever, but it was still a book that I had written that would be on some shelf in some book shop. When I think about it that way, I suppose my 'dream' was deteriorating for quite some time, I just didn't notice. I thought it was just part of growing up and seeing the world differently. I suppose it was, but since a friend encouraged me not to give up on writing (I don't need to explain, right? You knew that by the end of this blog there would be an uplifting, happy ending and my love of writing would have been restored, right?) , I've decided that it's not okay to lose faith in dreams. I have to say, I do believe that dreams should be something achievable - I mean, the idea that I will one day appear on Glee as the English exchange student with the amazing singing voice is a fantasy, not a dream. I think it's important to recognise the difference between the two.
Okay so... back to that happiness stuff. I stopped writing because I thought that the outcome (not having a book published) would be devastating after a lot of hard work. It would. However, being in a writing funk didn't make me very happy either. So, I had to choose. I chose to stop being so freaking negative and just try to write a book (obviously... have you even been paying attention?) which makes me pretty happy now. I aim for an outcome that will do the same.
In case you were wondering, there are some things I currently do that don't make me happy in the slightest, but I have to do for the end result. For example, I get up at 6:30, four times a week. I shouldn't be moaning, I know, a lot of you get up earlier for more mornings a week, but this is about me so... yeah. This doesn't make me happy but I kind of have to do it to go to work/uni. I have to do those things to earn money/get a degree. I need to do those things so that I can buy things and one day... earn more money. It's so sad that's how the world works. I'm really hoping I'll just win the lottery one day. Obviously I'm lazy at heart.
What I hope you will have got out of this blog: 'What If' is a really annoying thought, and should be abandoned at the earliest opportunity.
I've become a Gleek in about two weeks. Amazing.
'And that's what you missed on' my life.
Ciao,
Tails.
