I like to think I’m generally a happy person. However, I’ve most definitely gone through some hard times and had my fair share of sadness. Everyone has.

But, as I walked through campus today, I felt a sense of happiness that all I wanted to do was tell someone about. I was smiling and breathing and just living as a happy person.

Okay, so what?

I think that everyone should be able to find some happiness in their daily life, whether it’s remembering that you go to a wonderfully acclaimed school on a beautiful campus or that you’re working towards your dream career while here.

I was everyone to feel the happiness I felt while I walked today, and I think that it all starts with handling things. I’ve worked a lot on how I process things and how I let things affect me and how I go about life. A big part of happiness is realizing that you have to choose to be happy. I’m not saying that all mental illness can be cured by deciding to be happy and all your problems will magically melt away should you look in the mirror and go “I’m going to be happy and forget all the sad stuff.” A lot of why I can find happiness and compartmentalize my sadness or anything that’s going on is the fact that I take medicine to handle my clinical depression. After that step, though, I have to get to a point where I’m upset about something, whether it be a fight with family or friends, or something stupid like I missed out on concert tickets, or whatever it may be: I need to put that aside and say “ok, right now I can’t control that, but I can control me, so I’m going to control me and choose happiness today.”

Some ways to choose happiness are to look at how lucky you are to be alive and where you are in life, or to do good recklessly, or even to compliment a friend. There’s millions of ways to forget the bad stuff for a short while and just completely immerse yourself in happy thoughts. My favorite is to do good recklessly, provided that I can.

Uh, Cait, what do you mean by “do good recklessly?”

I mean that you’re spreading the positivity that perhaps you aren’t feeling right now, but someone else needs a little bit more than you. If you’re at a grocery store and someone needs some help with money or can’t cover their groceries, even if it COULD be a scam, if you have the means to help even a little, do it. Do that good deed recklessly, not caring if it could be a scam. That sounds kind of stupid, but hear me out.

You could go out of your way to thank the bus driver, or even pay for the order behind you in a drive through. Small things that make you happy.

I was sad yesterday, and someone asked me for a dollar for a school project where they has to try to earn the most money in an hour. I donated a dollar. Did it feel like a waste? No. It felt like I was helping something, and I had the means to do so.

Do Good Recklessly.

Choose Happy.

Make Your Own Happiness.