Give Yourself Permission To Be Happy

As a society, we like to tell stories of people who overcome SO much, and it was worth it all because then they were BLESSED with something extraordinary.

I would like to politely claim BS on this and the perpetual problems it creates for us mentally.

We think we need to overcome in order to be able to justify a big win. We’ve learned that us having something takes away from someone else. “There isn’t enough for everybody.”

Or if you’re a people pleaser, you don’t want to outshine or make someone else feel inferior (which is not on you in the first place). Maybe you’ve grown up with conditional love and the idea that you should be living the same way as everybody.

You only believe you’re worthy of love if you’re the same. And the people you grew up with were in pain, so you made sure you stayed in pain. Happy wasn’t a default of your reality. It wasn’t even something you thought could be the baseline for things.

Focus On Your Glass Of Water

To explain it in the way I would to my child, imagine you have a glass of water in your hand. No matter what you do, there will always be water in that cup. It’s magic. Nothing could ever change it. Even if you drink it, pour it out, or share some of it with a friend, it will always refill itself. You will always have more than enough.

You will always have this cup. It’s yours to keep. It never leaves. It simply exists.

And someone taught you that your cup was always enough. They taught you to trust that you would always have what you need. You’ve always known that you could share from your cup but that your cup was your responsibility, and everyone else had to take care of their own cup.

Now, imagine you look across the street, and you see someone holding their own cup. Nothing about it is different than yours. Same exact cup down to the etching.

But no one ever told this person they were holding a magic cup, and they are thirsty. So very thirsty. Instead of looking down to drink from their cup, they see yours and want to take it. They wander the street looking for cups, but when they take from them, they try to grab the water by hand. Because remember, you can’t take someone else’s cup.

And the water they take may help a little. But it’s never enough. They can never keep it. Until one day, if we’re lucky, they realize they have their own magic cup and they don’t need to try to take from anybody. They can see you with your cup and not worry because they know they are already taken care of. They are loved. They are worthy. Their needs are seen and met.

When they are thirsty, they know what they need to do to fix it without going outside of themselves, hurting someone else, or feeling like they need to prove they are worthy enough to have water in their cup because it just simply exists.

In real life, it can take people their whole lives to know they have to see their cup. You can keep borrowing or stealing, but until you can see your cup and know that it will always keep water, you’ll always be looking for it outside of yourself.

The Rules Don’t Exist

I grew up in the Bible Belt. For those of my international readers, it’s a section of the Southeastern part of the United States. And Christianity, being the foundation of your childhood and teenage years, is like breathing. It just happens, and you don’t question it.

I don’t think we can cover everything in one blog post that lays out the issues that come with this. But when you learn everything that you can do wrong before you ever learn who you are, what your soul was meant to do in this life, and what is meant to make you happy, well, you’re doomed from the start.

Now, as a girl working through abandonment issues, I’ll tell you that getting these rules at a young age, for a society that’s supposed to unconditionally love and accept you, only to feel like the rules don’t work for you and everyone is judging everyone constantly, creates lots of issues.

And it can mean, regardless of whether or not you’re healing from religious trauma, that you don’t try things because you’ve been taught love has conditions. Or you’re only allowed to do things a certain way.

The choice to be happy isn’t a choice for you because you’ve ruled it out as an option based on what you’ve been taught or believe you need to be safe.

What if the rules didn’t exist? What if they could be rewritten? What rule would you need to follow in order to know you could be happy?

You Don’t Need To Justify Being Happy

That moment we talked about at the beginning of today’s post? It was just a few months ago.

I was miserable. I was addicted to misery. Trapped in a cycle of pain. And I knew that I couldn’t imagine surviving another decade of this version of life. Not in a suicidal kind of way. But I thought there was no way someone could actually live being miserable 99% of the time.

It had to change their brain. Maybe shrink it or morph it in a bad way? It couldn’t possibly be healthy. You can’t actually survive this way, right?

I desperately wanted someone to look at me and say it’s okay to change. It’s okay for you to be happy. You don’t have to stay in this miserable space.

Until one day, I was the person who said that for me. I recognized I was choosing pain. I hadn’t even considered happy. Because I was afraid someone would say I was unworthy of being happy in life. And I couldn’t defend why I deserved to have all of the nice things.

Logically, I did the tally on all of the big things I’d gone through in my short life. The stuff I remember. The stuff my subconscious has removed for me, and I’ve only learned via other people telling me.

And I wondered, what would be enough for you to justify finally being happy in life?

Now, because I’ve shared my life online for a decade, grew up in an environment where there were rules for what is allowed when it comes to happiness, and am an empath, I needed to take it deeper.

At what point do you think people would find it acceptable that you are happy and worthy of an abundant life? Why would you need to justify it to them? And can you imagine how many humans you would have to prove it to daily just to keep up with their needs?

For reference, the blog will hit 1 million readers this year. We just hit 2 million views on Youtube. We’ve had 1.1. million views on Tiktok this year. And at least 125k in the last three months on Instagram. That’s a lot of flipping people to justify and is nearly impossible.

If we start thinking there’s a point at which happiness is allowed, someone will always move the goal post. It will actually never exist. And for some people, the sun shining on their face is enough to make them happy. Others, they will never know because they are still living with such deep unmet emotional needs that happiness isn’t a registering option. They lead with jealousy (and pain layered under everything).

You’ll never be able to justify your right to happiness when the people who want you to justify it aren’t willing, ready, or able to process the cavern of pain dwelling deep inside. Remember: they have to be able to see their cup.

Consume Consciously

One of the things I ask people to do during my 12 Week Mental Reset, 75 Love, is to put timers on their social media apps every day. There are a dozen reasons why but one of the biggest ones is when you haven’t evaluated how you consume content online, or how much, you don’t realize that your body chemically struggles with all of the emotion switching.

Hopefully someone will do a study to back me on this someday (or maybe it already exists). But think about it. If you’re just swiping, watching a series of 7-second videos or maybe a bit longer, your body doesn’t really have a chance to differentiate between the emotions from each video.

And we know that the algorithm is built to be addictive.

So if your brain has been chemically trained to go from happy to sad to angry to distressed to doubtful in 35 seconds, how healthy do you think you’ll be emotionally without making sure you take the space away?

Be Aware Of How You Feed Your Emotional Patterns

This will go hand in hand with everything else, but when you recognize what you’re doing instead of choosing to be happy, you have to learn how you’re feeding it.

These might come in all kinds of ways to pay attention to your routines this week to see where it might be happening even subtly.

For me, this can look like reading stories where the FMC is in an impossible emotional turmoil until someday someone sees how much pain she’s been carrying and helps her feel worthy of releasing it.

Always reading the comments on social media to see how much people hate whatever is happening, because believing people will always mean to me means I don’t have to believe I am worthy of being happy despite all of the bad things.

“Just checking” to see how something did, so I can decide if it’s okay for me to be at peace.

We will talk about resetting my Dopamine Routine in an upcoming blog post. But that, plus realizing I had to choose to be happy, plus a whole lot of practical changes, have helped with this tremendously.

Is It An Internet Problem, Or A Real One?

Speaking of, this was a comment I saw a few years back, and it stuck with me. It’s honestly one of the biggest reasons I’ve stopped posting or started posting differently.

I’ve always wanted WSS to be a space of healing. And what I’ve learned through the process of healing is that you don’t tend to live your life trying to repeatedly solve the same problem if you’re actually doing the work of healing.

But you have to actually let yourself heal. Which means removing yourself from the algorithm and the people who are focused on reminding you of a problem that often only exists on the internet.

If you could spend an entire week in the world, and no one would say the things out loud that people on social media scream is a problem, it’s time to reconsider it.

How To Be Happy, Practically

Make A List Of The Little Things That Make You Happy

I love baking. I love listening to an album from start to finish. Browsing the antique store in my hometown is another favorite pastime, where I admire all the treasures that have survived and carry history.

I also love the tea I drink every morning. The ice I put in my matcha. The slippers that I can’t live without and used to spend hours on set dreaming about the moment I would slide on after a day of filming.

What are you missing every day that actually makes you happy? Or what are you doing that you could change easily that would impact you greatly (even if it seems trivial)?

Could listening to music in the morning on your walk, instead of the business podcast that says nothing new, make you happy? Would driving a different way to work that takes 5 minutes longer but fills your soul with joy and lets you dream make you happy?

Would wearing the bright pink suit to work instead of the black one make you happy?

The truth is, we have a million moments a day to be happy. We just don’t see them. We either take them for granted or we think they are not an option for us. But is being miserable getting you more of the life you want to be living? What would happen if you swapped just one or two things for something that made you happy?

Plan For Future Happy Things (Just For You)

I am the friend who is always planning. And sometimes it’s exhausting to be the one caroling the humans. So instead, I like to put things on my calendar once a month that are just for me. Something special.

Maybe a blocked-out window to read a new book that’s launching or a solo lunch date before seeing a new movie.

I did a bookstore strolling and shopping date a few weeks ago before seeing Wicked: For Good. Aimlessly browsing our quaint Barnes & Noble (I bought this book) before landing at Dillard’s to try on (and buy) this stunning green skirt as a potential outfit for the movie.

Put something on the calendar that is just for you. A walk in your favorite neighborhood, looking at all the houses while drinking your favorite coffee. An uninterrupted shopping trip to do your Christmas shopping. A long lunch at your favorite restaurant with a new book on Kindle and a glass of wine.

Make a big deal (and a plan) out of times you’re intentionally going to be happy.

Re-Evaluate And Adjust As Needed

If you’re a goal setter, you might find that it comes naturally to you to check in with your goals monthly. But how often are you checking in to see if you’re happy? Or if there’s room for improvement with how much happiness you’ll allow in your life?

You see we’ve been told to work hard, to hustle, to grind until it’s all happening. So much so that sometimes we forget the little details we wanted as a standard part of our lives when we first started chasing our dreams.

We’re coming up at the end of the year, so I’ll be post this soon: How To Become That Girl In The New Year (sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss it). But I love doing this yearly (sometimes on my birthday, sometimes with the New Year) because it’s an opportunity to check in on the details of our dreams.

My version of her is slowly coming back into focus: one who travels internationally regularly, has a wonderful audience online, tells stories about her life, wear clothes that make her feel incredible, eats delicious things, and lives a life with the man & familly or her dreams.

But the details are what I like to keep my eye on. Things like how often do I feel like I’m required to do something or should do something vs the list of things that fill me up creatively.

I pretty much cut out all Self Development work this year and indulged heavily in music. A trend I will repeat for 2026.

My previous (and still building dream) was one where I had the most Fallon Carrington closet (thank you Meredith for your stunning costume design) where everyday’s outfit felt like main character energy. It’s a work in progress but it reminds me of what the details of happy look like for me even when I forget.

Sometimes we get lost in the chaos. We tell ourselves we’re too busy or we think something requires more of us mentally than it really does and we push it off.

Or maybe we’re quitely denying our happiness and we don’t realize it.

Make time to re-evulate your happiness: what’s working, what needs tweaking and what needs a makeover entirely. I’ll dive more into how to dig into the niche details of this over the next few weeks so stay tuned for more blog content. But for now, I love you. I’m sending you so much good energy. And I’ll chat with you very soon. Xoxo, Savvy