Hello beautiful people,

Welcome to Nel’s column!

First of all, thank you for clicking on the first ever post of this new column  – a billion bonus points for you if you read it till the end!

I have been thinking about what would be the perfect topic for my first post and the answer came quite easily.

Nel’s column is part of this little corner on the internet that I created and called “Our Happy Corner” but what actually is happiness?

Well, like anyone who’s ever wanted to get the definition of a word, I looked it up in the dictionary and – I am not even joking – this is what the entry for happiness read: “The state of being happy.” No shit, Sherlock! Not very useful at all.

Now I could have gone straight to the entry for happy and go from there – though I wouldn’t even be surprised if it would have read something like “the opposite of unhappy” – but instead it made me wonder how I, myself, would define happiness.

And the more I thought about it and the more I struggled with coming up with a general definition that I could suggest to the dictionary people.

When I think about happiness, I see the moments spent with my boyfriend and my rabbit Charlie, I see Books and Sweets and how much I enjoy working on this little corner of the internet, I see a great book with sweet characters and a heartwarming story, I see travelling and discovering a new culture etc.

How do you turn that into a dictionary entry?

On top of that, we are all unique beautiful beings and what makes me happy would not necessarily make you happy and vice versa because we do not have the same interests, desires or aspirations.

For example, I have a few friends who are not too fond of pets so if I were to define happiness as spending time with your furry family members, they would be doomed to a lifetime of unhappiness.

We might not be able to agree on a universal definition of happiness but we all know how it feels when we are happy and, unfortunately, we also know when we are not.

And the reason behind that is because happiness comes from within us. There is no happiness elixir or secret recipe.

Happiness is a feeling in you waiting to be discovered. And you discover it by following your heart and letting go of your fears – because yes, it can be scary to be happy.

Unhappiness can be comforting for some people because that is either what they’ve always known and it has become their comfort zone or because they are scared that if they allow themselves to be happy even for one second, it would feel even more painful when happiness will inevitably be taken away from them.

If this is how you feel, I want you to know that no one can take away your happiness but you, just like you are the only person who can make yourself happy.

Discover what it is that gives you that warm feeling in your stomach and puts a smile on your face and hold on to it. Do more of it, put it in everybody’s face without any guilt, abuse the shit out of it and never let go of that smile.

And then come back here and let me know in the comments what makes you happy! I am so excited to know 🙂

xoxo,

Nel