Member-only story
Nobody Has the Power to Take Away Your Happiness
Though people will try
When I was in college, I sometimes experienced meanness from those who lived on the same floor in my dorm. Years later, while talking to a friend who had lived in the same place, he told me something that astonished me.
“They were deliberately targetting you,” he said.
“Why would they do that?” I asked, confused.
“Because you were happy and they didn’t like that.”
I was astonished. Why would anyone care about anyone else’s happiness? Isn’t it more productive to focus on your own head space instead of someone else’s?
Besides, don’t we all have the right to happiness?
After all, the Declaration of Independence states: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Therefore, I had a constitutional right to happiness, or at least to pursue it.
I look back at those people and I ask myself — what insecurities were they dealing with that created that desire to hurt me? Did they consider themselves unworthy of happiness, or unable to find it? Their actions were…
