An upbeat personality makes senior Maryam Bledsoe wake up every morning and decide to start her day off right. She understands herself in a way that makes her comfortable to confront any worries or unhappiness she haves, which makes her able to reach her full potential through a good attitude.
“I really like listening to music. I feel like that’s a really basic thing to say, but music legitimately does make me happy. I can be in the worst mood, put on some Childish Gambino or 80s music and my mood entirely changes. I really enjoy spending time with friends, especially outside. My favorite thing to do is hike with other people. Also, I think with happiness, people don’t understand how much of an effort it really is. Happiness sometimes comes naturally, like when something good happens. To maintain a constant level of contentment really does take work. To think through your emotions and to understand what and why specific things bother you and how to minimize that is something that I’ve been trying to train myself to do. To wake up in the morning and make an active effort and decide I’m not going to be weighed down by things I might not be happy about. My personal philosophy is, ‘Life is really what you make of it.’ I know that’s a cheesy thing to say, but if you make an active effort every morning to be your best person, then I feel like your mood exponentially goes up every day that you try to implement that. I have definitely lost my happiness before. Mainly, it was just understanding what happened to make myself feel that way allowed me to regain my happiness. Sometimes when I’m unhappy, I try to push it off and deny the fact that I’m unhappy. I don’t think that’s a very productive way to deal with unhappiness because the feelings I have are not going to go away just because I don’t acknowledge them. When you don’t acknowledge them, they fester. Now, whenever I’m unhappy, I try to think about why. I can rationalize through it and talk about it with other people. I do this thing where I write in my journal and if you have negative emotions, you can tear the paper up and it’s gone forever. That physical representation of my feelings is helpful, as well. I think just understanding yourself is important for happiness.”