You are happiness

I sat on the couch. Suddenly I started to laugh. Without an apparent reason.
I thought I was incredibly fool.
Or maybe just happy.

I do not know what happiness looks like. It’s a bit like God, everyone thinks to know him but nobody has ever seen him. And I’m scared that one day, Leone, my son, might ask me (or almost certainly he’ll ask me):

mother what is happiness?

Don’t know what to answer scare me. I really would prefer, and I’m not kidding, if he ask me where children come from, because in that case I should just tell him the truth.
Maybe I know what love is but not happiness. Maybe. Maybe love makes happiness.

That means happiness depends on something or someone. As my friends might say: this is terrible.
Yes is terrible to think that happiness depends on a person, object, journey, gesture.
Because if it is true, if it is true that happiness depends on others, then it means that we will never be happy on our own.

I probably wasn’t brought up to happiness. I do not know, I’m just reasoning, but it’s true that life does everything to gets in our way since we are kids.

I was about 7 or 8 years, it was the day of catechism and I remember I was wearing a colorful overalls I really like. I got out my mum’s car, I got close with my “friends” and I realize they were looking at me speaking in a low voice and giggling. I knew right away that they were kidding me about how I was dressed. For the first time in my life I felt inadequate. I cried until evening, holding back tears during catechism time and the next day I went to school pretending like nothing happened.

Happiness at that time was simply being accepted.
But it was not happiness because although they, like me, did not pretend like nothing, I couldn’t feel comfortable.

A few years later – those same people – filled the walls of my country with my first name and surname, alongside the “slut” epithet. I didn’t do anything, I was 12 years old and I did not even know what love was, let alone sex.
We did not talk anymore.

I do not want to tell you the traces of what happened, it wreck me psychologically. That was the first scar on my heart.
I did everything to be accepted and, in the end, it was all for nothing.

The following years I continued to get wrong, chasing love, friendship, work, trying to please others denying myself, my identity. I got wrong and I keep doing it.

I’m sorry because in this way I’m stopping me from being happy.

So, Leone, what is happiness?
Accept ourselves.

Accept what we are, against everything, despite everything, even though ourselves. Sexuality, race, hair color, style, passions: no one has the right to tell us that we are wrong. And if someone ever makes you feel inadequate, do not believe him.

We are born different for a thousand reasons and diversity is the engine of the world.

Where do you find happiness?

In front of the mirror.
Maybe you do not recognize it, because it’s a simple thing.
Look, you are happiness.

Choose to be happy.

Graphic design: Silvia Blazina
© The Eat Culture