People don’t become happy because of what they have, but who they are.
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When I first started college I met many kinds of people, those who strive and do their best like a madman to get good grades through any means necessary, those who does not care a bit about academics, and everyone else in between. Well I am the type who sits on the front-most row every class. I try to do my best in class, and I am proud of it to the extent I am really confused by those who seems to just want to have fun in their lives. How could they stay happy knowing they have bad grades and uncertain future? My first semester was glorious, I got a GPA of 3.96. But as the semesters went through, my grades start to drop, especially now, during the pandemic. In fact, I am writing this at 2 a.m. when I should be sleeping right now. It just happens that I am now not the ambitious student I used to be.
Getting bad grades and feeling depressed, I started thinking is my worth decided by my grades? do I want people to see who I am just because of my grades? Recalling me being myself at the first semester, I was already cheerful and brave not even having any grades back then, to the extent of sharing christmas cards after the final exams to many people. I just enjoyed the process and being myself, I don’t care what others think even if I was the ambitious student and probably some doesn’t even like me.
I think the reason my grades start falling down is when I thought that my people only see my worth because of my grades, and as it gets worse, I feel worse as well, and because I don’t feel good, I don’t study well, thus not getting good grades. Thinking about it, the only person in this world worthy to value our worth is only ourselves. Even if the whole world thinks the opposite, we will still feel good if we believe we are doing great, and feeling good will lead to good thoughts, and to good actions, thus good future as well.
So how do we make ourselves feel good? Maybe it is possible to lie to another person about how we are feeling about ourselves, but lying to ourselves about how we are feeling is impossible. The only possible way to make ourselves feel good is to do good things, and to place ourselves as the person whom we wanted to be, in short, to do the things that needs to be done. Realizing that we are moving on the right direction will make us believe that we are doing great. This is why happiness is not based on money or material. Even if someone has a lot of money/material, as long as they realize that they are not doing the things that should be done, they will still feel bad about their lives. Same applies to someone who does not have anything, but is doing good things, they will feel happy regardless.