You can't buy hapiness

What is it... Oh yeah... "My plate runneth over!"

I'm happy now.

I think so, in a sort of indirect way sometimes. It's tough to decide if it is appropriate to try to confront the sadness in some way, or try to move past it, like if it is not doing anything good being stuck in it... There is also a great saying in "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran that says Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. I still don't quite grasp it, but I think it has a very deep undertone that I could think about for hours and try to make sense of. It kind of relates I think in ways to the whole joy to sorrow or sorrow to joy thing, in my opinion though... Like the sorrow is trying to keep your joy hidden, and is not the natural thing that should be there in many of those occasions.

Glad you are having fun talking back and forth. That's always nice, and the feeling is mutual. It's tough to try to logically think about things that are mostly on a different sort of level in many ways. In some ways I make choices, but it's still a choice that is rooted in an emotional sort of level, as far as the joys and sadness levels, and how they tend to be feeling-based. I can have knee-jerk responses as well from things, and that can send me into a lower state of mind than I'd be in if I took a minute to analyze my situation, and take the higher road. Sometimes that first reaction can ruin many hours out of my day, or carry over to others, and then I sort of "dump" the toxic sort of sludge onto them because of the weight the negative stuff can have over me when I get angry about it. I think anger is the first manifestation of most negative thinking, since it's the first thing and the easiest one to change it to, at least in most of my own experiences, especially if I am incapable of dealing with a specific emotion or feeling at a given time.

I find practice and recognition of these times at the first sign to be of utmost importance to try to improve upon them and do better over time. It takes constant vigilance though... and many months to make any real progress. I have a long way to go in my own journey with these feelings. For some time I was able to get away from negative self-talk for the most part by being vigilant and replacing the bad feelings with better ones to replace them... Sometimes I would also talk to my feeling and tell it to get away from me, or tell it to leave my head. I felt a sense of relief if it would work. I think it is important not to just remove a bad thing, because like digging a hole, the dirt you removed is still a space, like a negative number, so it needs to be filled with something else positive in order to make it whole... Unlearning a behavior is one of the hardest things we can do in life, I think.

I was able to do the same thing of "letting and allowing a feeling to pass" when I had anxiety issues of panic when going places. I had a certain trigger spot when I would try to go anywhere to eat. I felt this anxiety feeling when I was on the way there, and when I actually got to these places. Since I had a trigger I could work on, I was able to eventually just keep letting the feeling pass until I became sort of "desensitized" and now I don't even think about it or connect the two situations with any anxiety or thought of it. The same is not true with my general anxiety, but I think it's biological, since I have neuroborreliosis (neuro-lyme) and some other issues that contribute.

It is hard to say what is right or wrong based on trying to make myself happy or not, and when it's better to allow it to be, in order to learn and overcome it, and when it should be removed with other tools I can pick up along the way. In some cases I think it helps to remove it if I can, or think it might be detrimental to others, since it can cause others around me bad times, and I'd rather not cause any of the carry over if I can help it, but to ever learn to deal with a lot of the feelings, I have to find that middle ground and balance between how much I can learn from it and sort of "let it pass through me as it is, without really resisting", and then letting it fester too long, and not properly dealing with it. I guess it is a judgement call in many cases... A fight or flight response can be very difficult, when one wants to flee all the time from anything that feels bad as a first response. Practicing for me has helped, and just raising my awareness of what it is, and if I can do anything to try to either allow it through and just be, or try to learn how to change the feeling just takes experiences in the moments, and figuring out with each time which way ends up improving my life the most, in a general overall way of seeing it. Hard to really word, but something to that effect is how I think about it.

Because it was a bad poem, but it included a good thinking. :P