Do I deserve to be happy?

Bravo! Great conclusion. That's the kind of energy that comes from within and can make you soar!
(&&&)

 

Shot in the dark here, but might have been the internalized voice of one of your parents, that you mistook as your own thoughts?

 

do you deserve to be happy? the short answer is Yes, of course. the longer answer is; what does that happiness look like to you? and there's the trick, it's different for everyone.

and as for what kept you, or keeps us from seeing it is fear. Fear of change, Fear of being different, Fear of judgment from family and society in general, Fear of ourselves, and even Fear of happiness itself.

we internalize that fear, make it part of our voice, part of something deep in our souls. maybe it's programming from past times when homophobia was even more wide spread, maybe it's from some sort of thought system that if you're happy someone else must be sad and it isn't fair to be happy if they are not..... so everyone should be miserable. I remember hearing things like that when I was small.

but in the end we all deserve to be happy; and we all are, ultimately, responsible for giving this precious gift to ourselves. when we do it radiates and actually helps others.

 

I do not believe any one individual deserves to be happy. Its not how life works. I do fully and completely believe that has the innate ability to define for themselves what happiness means and go and achieve happiness.

Its up to each of us to become happy through our own initiatives, work and ambition.

 

Hmm.. but the point of this thread ( at least how I saw it, forgive me if i assumed too much) was if we ourselves think that we deserve to be happy or not. That's is the key. If we trust we are deserving of that or not .

Because if we decide that we do deserve that then we actually put our initiative, ambitions to work in that direction. If we do not , we self sabotage those efforts.

The thread was never about life or some similar greater external authority, real or imagined, thinks that we deserve to be happy .

 

I think we are all saying the same thing.

 

I asked for divorce about five years ago. I knew I was nit happy and had not been happy for at least 10 years and my actions were not consistent with my beliefs and were not deserving of some who I truly respected and loved (my ex wife). I didn't leave expressly because I beleived I was gay, but I think there was something instinctive that I was acting upon. I didn't articulate any of those feelings but something in me just knew it was the right thing for me and for her. After that decision, I began to sleep again (I had spent about five years having difficulty sleeping at night).

I have had times post divorce that I have second guessed my decision, mostly regrets about how I treated her and about the effects on our finances. But each time I have been asked by therapists and others "do you want her back?" My gutteral reaponse has been "no." What hurts is seeing her going through the pain and shock of a divorce and feeling it was from out of yhe blue. And the pain of knowing I was not fully yruthful anout the whys of our divorce. I am now coming back to the point where I was when I asked for the divorce to again start confronting the issues I was dealing with at the time (mainly my sexuality).

I hope that some day I will have the courage to tell her what was really going on with me as I do still care for her and I do not wish her to continue to blame herself for our divorce.

 

I do think everyone deserves to be happy, or at least to find his/her own happiness. It's simple. Don't overthink this.

 

i think this is the crux of the problem with happiness. happiness is different for everyone, your truth points you towards your 'happy place' and your sense of self worth is what tells you when you get there, kind of like climbing a steep hill and hitting the plateau with the broad vista and sense of peace and arrival.

 

I have the same thoughts Barista. I often think "But transitioning will hurt other people. My family will be devastated, they'll disown me, and the unit will crumble and fall. Do I really deserve to put my happiness ahead of that of others?"

I think I do. We all do. We are only responsible for ourselves and our own happiness and feelings. We can't make others happy by making ourselves miserable.

 

this is the truth we all have to learn. polite society tells us to be responsible for others, but if this leaves us miserable, how can we bring others up? you can't pour from an empty cup. if each of us makes ourselves happy, without harming others, then we radiate this and give light to those we come in contact with, and they do to us. this magnifies, sort of like a single light on the Christmas tree is pretty, but all together they light up the room.

and the other part is if our being miserable is the only way for others to be happy, do we need to fulfill their needs at the expense of our own? this is toxic to us and to those around us, including the ones we are miserable for.

 

Precisely.

 

Baristajedi,

I'll write this quick before I head to work (I'm on Pacific time) so I apologize if I've missed anything subsequent to the first few posts. I want to respond now because something really resonated with me.

In my life one of the biggest impacts of fear is that it has kept me playing a small game and not taking enough risks. Sometime long ago I concluded that I must be defective, and therefore I must "earn" what is every straight person's gift from birth - self love. Rather than loving myself by my nature, deeply from within, I felt I needed to "earn" it. This desperate search for self love has kept me playing it safe, striving to be "acceptable" to others, and especially not taking too many risks of my own heart's volition.

The result is that I have not my own life, but the life I created in a response to what I thought others wanted of me. Yes, I have many gifts and I feel privileged to have them. But deep down inside, those outward manifestations of success belie a deeper insecurity that I'm not already intrinsically lovable. That perfect life that seems so wonderful to others on the outside can make me feel an aching void inside.

I've never been married, and I've been out for a relatively long time, since I was 22. I'm now 44. The handwriting was on the wall (and the explicit shaming began) when I was outed to my family when I was 12.

So even though I've been out a long time, I sometimes feel the pangs of hunger for authenticity and self-love. All the success I have today is rightfully mine, but it's a little extra "glossy" on the outside because I'm insecure. Gay men (in particular, I don't know about women) often live in a palace of physical pleasure and material things, but they're impoverished in a spiritual jail cell.

For some reason an old move, "Shawshank Redemption" comes to mind. An innocent man is worngfully convicted of murder and sent to prison for several decades. Although he is bombarded with physical and spiritual deprivation, he never once feels imprisoned. He eventually escapes (literally, physically) because of his never having been rightfully punished to begin with. He transcends injustice.

Queer folk are the exact opposite, and yet we're exactly the same. We're wrongfully "convicted" and ostracized by a homophobic and heteronormative society, and yet, unlike the protagonist of Shawshank, we willingly imprison ourselves. Out of a deep self-hate we take the key from the jailor and gladly lock ourselves up for a crime we never even committed in the first place. This jail sentence of the heart has devastating spiritual, social, mental, and physical consequences.

We (I) all too often live in a prison of unrealized happiness when we play it safe, take too few risks, aim to please, and put our own needs after others from a deep sense of unworthiness. I think you may be glimpsing the unreality of this prison, questioning your intuition, and beginning to see (and possibly grieve) the loss that comes with a prison sentence.

Yes, you deserve to be happy. You deserve love, and you deserve everything you deserved the moment you were born. Personally, I believe that those are God's gifts to you and you can't be denied them - ever. Or another viewpoint is that your place in the universe is just as beautiful and deserving as any other - yes, really, truly.

*warm, long embrace of long-overdue, unconditional love*

Patrick

 

^^^ exactly, clustergazelle!

*thumbs up*

 

That first post is full of typos, sorry!

Patrick