I’ve struggled with the difference between what joy and happiness is, and especially how to categorize what I feel and when. Am I happy? What emotions am I experiencing, and should they even be labeled as one or another? Am I a happy person or a sad person? And it is even fair to classify a person, let alone myself in this way?

In the experiencing of times that are primarily filled with less-than-ideal circumstances, it is easy to label the person experiencing that time as sad or unhappy. Furthermore, reducing a time to a single-worded emotion is simple, but it is not fair. This reduction does not allow for the multiplicity of thought and the permeability of emotion. Hearts and emotions change, often and quickly. 

In observing people, externally or in the understanding of how the outside world comprehends me as, ‘happy,’ I wonder who is truly right. Jason Silva explained the original Charles Horton Cooley thought that –

 I am not who I think I am, but rather, I am who I think you think I am.

Have a watch

Many people perceive me as happy, but it is who or what I tie the importance of my external self-perception of to. I’ve had friends and loved ones who have explored me, and understood the depths of my pains and joys. I’d say those explorers know the fluid self that is Anna. I do not place so much importance on the opinions of those who see an external glimpse; nothing against them, they just don’t know me as well. 

I’d gotten a book some years ago called, We Feel Fine – there is also a website which lends to the complexity (an understatement) of human emotion. It is a work tied to developing a sense of better understanding to the feeling of feelings. Perhaps in the understanding of them, we can feel them better, and more appropriately channel the energy from them into action of creation, rather than destruction. 

Anna Badrieh