How To Be Happy: The Next Chapter

Though it’s easy to scoff at the horribly cliché title of this blog post, I’m hoping that if my life were in book form, the next few months would prove to be the ultimate page-turner. As a literature fiend, a truly sickening book metaphor seems to be the easiest way to shout out to the world that I’m moving to Australia. Cue the dramatic ‘duh, duh, duhhhhh’.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post that I chose not to publish. The basic tone of such post was I'm soo bored I hate my life woe is meeeee and nobody’s got time to listen to a measly excuse of a blogger waffling on about her sorrows when our lives are often hard enough to manage on their own. I was down in the dumps, unsatisfied, a grumpy grizzly, if you will. After a hefty few months of wallowing, I decided that my slightly unhinged and flat life needed a re-service. After all, do things really need to be 100% broken to warrant the need to be fixed?

In an attempt to bid farewell to the sulk, I culled everything that no longer made me happy because, let's cut to the chase here, it is completely okay to focus on your own happiness. You are allowed to travel and live where you want, spend your money on nice things or sometimes tell friends you just want a night in. To think about your own happiness doesn’t make you selfish, it encourages you to take control of your emotions. It is futile to push on believing that things will fix themselves if you just sit back and watch life pass by.

I’ve wanted to live in Australia since the moment I stepped foot in the beautiful country on a school trip at aged 14 (we also went on a school trip to an actual dump so swings and roundabouts). My life plan, if there is such a thing, was always to save and take a post-uni ‘gap yah’. Reality struck and I fell into a job which coincidentally ended up being the best post-uni job possible, primarily due to my colleagues who I now regard as best friends. However, having worked in the same job for over two years, and amidst my little life lull of feeling flat and unfulfilled, I thought ‘fuck it’. To continue the cliché tone of this post, has the term 'life is too short' ever been more appropriate? 

The thought of leaving my friends and family indefinitely petrifies me, but as I wrote in this blog post, if we never did anything that scared us, we’d be really bloody bored. It’s time to whack out Skye (my Australian alter ego, obviously), spend Christmas on the beach and preferably become an absolute surfer babe (a girl can dream).  Let’s not talk about the fact I don’t have a job lined up or a place to live. Good job winging it is my forte. 

If you’re unhappy, bored, restless, or any other negative emotion, remember that there are opportunities within your power to improve things, whether it’s short term or the full shebang. You are the only one truly responsible for your happiness so if it’s within your control to fix/alter/achieve something, then for heaven’s sake stop contemplating and do. And if not, at least make a plan of how you will one day get there.

Guaranteed investing some thought into what it is that will make you happy and taking action on it will be far more freeing than you realise. I’m ready for the next chapter and I’m ready to wave an extremely teary goodbye to my life as I know it. I’ve got my one way ticket at the ready and I have a feeling it’s going to be pretty great.