Happiness Is An Inside Job: A True Story

No other person or external thing can make you happy for happiness is an inside job.

Before I knew this I relied externally on relationships, buying stuff, going out and blowing a bunch of money to make myself happy... Still, I was not happy.

What was missing?

It wasn't until I realized I had to look within myself to find happiness.

I had to do a lot of soul searching.

I had realized a few "patterns" of behavior that was keeping me from true happiness:

Avoidance and numbing.

I used to work 3 jobs to avoid the relationships I knew were not right for me and I used to wear the mask of happiness and perfectionism to hide the dysfunction in my life.

These things were just an "emotional band aid" to get temporary relief.

To sum it up, these things were just a form of avoidance.

One day it hit me like a ton of bricks, I asked myself why I was doing these things.

These were all just distractions to keep me from dealing with what was making me unhappy.

Once I finally had to courage to face these things, everything started changing for the better.

All I had to do was look within.

Through meditation and much soul searching, I uncovered what was wrong in my life

and healed it, then I was able to discover what truly made me happy.

Writing poems, blogs, songs and books was part of the healing process and it was a great release of what I had been holding onto for so long.

The artwork I did helped me, too as well as creating Transitions to Transformation Radio Show ™

I implemented what I learned in my Creative Responsibility class which was to channel the emotional stuff and turn it into something positive, this way you are not numbing or avoiding the issues, you're just simply acknowledging and transforming them from negative to positive.

My Mother Phyllis always told me "Do one thing a day that makes you happy".

This always got me through even the toughest of days.

Every time I was in a bad situation (and there were a lot of them) my Father James would say to me "This is only temporary" and sure enough, it was.