'Key To Happiness' - #HAWMC

Today's prompt for #HAWMC was: 'What do you think is the key to happiness?'..



‘Laughter is the best medicine’ is about the only cliché I can get on board with. Fair enough for medical professionals I’d imagine it’s rarely advised; as using only laughter as a one-cures-all fix is highly unlikely to work. Especially if you have broken ribs, then I’d wager laughter is just about the worst medicine you could take. But either way, it remains one of my most treasured expressions of joy.  

The key to my happiness is laughter. Hilarity is so utterly vital in maintaining happy relationships, be it romantic or otherwise. My partner for example, makes me laugh until I can’t breathe multiple times a day and having been in (short) relationships with humourless men, I know how unbelievably amazing that ability is. When I make my partner, friends and family laugh it feels like I’ve won a gold medal. I laugh at anything and everything, from someone falling over, to wordy satire about the state of the economy. (But mainly the first one). I’ve put myself in stupid situations to make people laugh, and pulled the ugliest faces known to mankind to generate a giggle. I can’t and refuse to try and understand people who don’t want to revel in laughter. Having a ridiculous and self-depreciating sense of humour saw me through childhood and my teens and deftly helped me swerve being bullied (I had braces, an ironing-board flat chest and boy hair).

I laugh a lot. Mainly at myself and my situation because I’m a ridiculous human being and the course my life has taken over the last few years is one which would leave me in a permanent funk if I didn’t take a step back to LOL at it. I’ve found that blogging and writing about my life with my condition has granted me a wonderful opportunity to remember that I am still alive and kicking. Doing my utmost to make an awful situation decidedly more bearable. When I take a step back to laugh at the moments when I’ve been bent over in a roomful of medical students with my most intimate areas on show, or when I’ve dropped a poo-sample out of my handbag and had to retrieve it from under a pensioners chair, allow me to remember that these things only feel incredibly embarrassing and curl-into-the-foetal-position-cringeworthy at the time. They are only as bad as you make them out to be. If you chose to laugh at your supposed misfortune instead of weeping and wailing about it, you have no idea the change it will make to your outlook.

Crohn’s disease doesn’t make me happy, it makes my life much harder than it should ever have to be, but the day I stop laughing at myself and the world around me, is the day I give up. Something I can’t ever see happening. For starters I haven’t even mentioned my teenage dress-sense…

This post was written as part of WEGO Health's Activist Writers Monthly Challenge - #HAWMC