Happiness is a choice

They sell us happiness like it’s on clearance at Target. A smile on a billboard, a weekend getaway, a curated morning routine with a side of spiritual bypassing. It’s all a trope, this shiny illusion that happiness is some grand destination we arrive at once everything finally stops being hard. News flash: it’s never going to stop being hard. Life doesn’t come with a bow; it comes with plot twists and coffee stains. The job, the healing, the relationship, the peace everyone else seems to have figured out, half of it’s smoke and mirrors, and the other half is people winging it while pretending they aren’t.

I learned that the hard way, somewhere between meditating on my bathroom floor, boarding flights I didn’t have the energy for, and losing someone I loved before I got the chance to tell her what she meant to me. Grief has a way of gut-punching you into awareness. One minute you’re scrolling through your phone, and the next you’re crying in the shower wondering how the world keeps moving when yours has stopped. I kept thinking, this isn’t the story I would’ve written for her. But life doesn’t ask for edits. It hands you the pen and dares you to keep writing anyway.

So, I did what I always do when I don’t know how to be human, I turned to the plants, to stillness, to that uncomfortable space between breaking and becoming. Cannabis didn’t make the pain go away; it gave it a place to sit. It reminded me I didn’t have to be strong, I just had to be present. Meditation taught me that same hard truth: happiness is a decision. Not a one-time choice, but a daily one. It’s a mental rebellion, choosing to see what’s good when your brain keeps whispering what’s not. It’s realizing that perception is power, that you can’t control the waves but you can learn how to surf.

Misery is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so is joy. What you focus on expands. The more you feed the darkness, the darker it gets. But when you start to search for the smallest traces of light - a song that hits your soul, the smell of rain, a stranger’s kindness, you realize the universe was never against you. It was just waiting for you to open your damn eyes.

My community reminded me of that. The love that poured in after my friend passed was something I can’t explain without tearing up. For the first time, I felt genuinely seen, supported, and loved.. not for being strong, but for simply being. That’s when I understood: happiness isn’t some faraway dream. It’s a perspective shift. It’s gratitude in motion. It’s choosing to see that even when life cracks you open, it’s only making more room for light to get in.

Healing is ugly and sacred all at once. You break, you become, and then you break again. You learn to laugh at the absurdity of it all; how one day you’re sobbing in traffic and the next you’re cracking up at a meme about Mercury retrograde ruining your life again. That’s the beauty of it, though. You keep finding reasons to smile even after the world gives you every reason not to. Maybe happiness isn’t a trope after all. Maybe it’s a rebellion, a daily decision to keep showing up, to keep finding light, to keep choosing joy even when it’s the hardest thing to do. Because at the end of the day, perception is everything. And I’d rather use mine to build a life that feels good, not just one that looks it.