This year has been a year filled with highs and lows not just for me but for many of those around me, as one of lives true observers I have sat back and watched as those around me friends, family, acquaintances have made life changing choices. We forget what a blessing it is that we even have all these options, all these choices to pick between. Dreamsreclyced was a choice one of the biggest choices I ever made in my life time, whether to gamble my divorce settlement on starting this business. I made this choice based on many factors but once I made it I moved full steam ahead. Starting your own business is not for the faint at heart it takes commitment belief in your self and sometimes luck. I feel very very fortunate that so many people use, like and understand my website and what I am trying to do with it on a bigger scale. On facebook this am I scrolled through this quote by JK Rowling “It’s our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities”. Such a great quote I like to think my choice to start DreamsRecycled says positive things about the person I am, but what happens when you start to make decisions choices based on negativity? Or as I have watched a lot recently, decisions based on “guilt”. Guilt has to be the worst emotion in the human gamete of emotions, it imprisons us in situations, marriages, jobs, relationships, etc we have no desire to be in. How many times have you heard people say I’m staying married for my children? I have to stay at this job because I need to pay bills for someone else an Ex a parent a child? I’m marrying someone because I’m pregnant. These on one hand seem like very adult responsible decisions to do the “right” thing in the eyes of society to appear to those around you to be putting others first. The problem with this though as I have watched a lot over the course of this year is that in doing this you make yourself miserable, the person staying in that situation can’t ever really be happy making decisions based on guilt. I’m not advocating everyone becoming a selfish bastard all of a sudden, but what I do think is there are ways to do things where you can indeed find happiness also. After all we each only have one life, one quite short life maybe 80 years of it, if you are lucky, don’t we ALL deserve personal happiness. For many years when I was married I didn’t actually believe I deserved this personal happiness I really thought that I had to stay for my children, I had to put on a happy face for them. I had a notebook once it said “smiling on the outside, crying on the inside” that was my life. Looking back I would give anything to have those years back that chance for happiness then. I don’t believe that actually staying married was making or made my children any happier, I think it just made them think they had an unhappy mother for all those years.
The hard part of the journey to choose self happiness is to actually believe you deserve it, to believe that you as a person are just as deserving of happiness as everyone around you. How you get to that point varies from person to person, sometimes it requires therapy , or doctors, self help books, a life changing event that clearly shows you how short life really is, a promotion or finding true love can all be triggers, for us to get out from under the guilt decision making process into the correct decision making process. Maybe sometimes it’s just a thought, a very small innocuous thought you have one day, that snow balls into the realization that you to need in a way to be selfish and aware of your own needs to make your self happy. People preach this a lot that you can not make any one else happy unless you are first happy in your own self, so by this thought process all the people out there making these life decisions based on guilt are not only making themselves, but those around them unhappy also. I have seen this personally over and over again. Someone staying in a relationship or getting married when they don’t actually want to creates two unhappy people it never works. The one doing the staying in guilt is unhappy and the one being stayed with through guilt is equally unhappy. They both are in different ways miserable. I personally can’t think of anything sadder than having someone be with you only because of guilt, we all deserve happiness and that is definite unhappiness right there. I want some one to want to be with me for one reason only for love, love creates happiness, guilt never ever does.
Maybe it’s just time that we look at life choices as choices in happiness…. we try to no longer judge people by decisions they make even if selfish to be happy. Happiness is life’s choice but along the way we have to somehow guide our life’s journey through these many choices. We have to surround our selves with people who aid us in being happy, who love us for us, and who together we can be happy with. So this is my thought for this week next time you hear of a couple getting divorced or splitting up, next time you hear someone leave their job to start a risky business, next time you hear of someone pregnant and NOT getting married, we should be happy for them as we know on some level they recognize that they too deserve and have the right like we all do to BE HAPPY!
Tiffany Beverlin
DreamsRecycled.com
tiffany@dreamsrecycled.com
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