Happiness or Self Respect

Happy Friday Bloggers! Hope everyone’s week has been great. My week has been consumed with biology. Practical and midterm oh my! Hopefully you all have lasted through your midterms- we can finally get some sleep. Anyway beside my little personal notes, my blog is going to be based on prompt two of our assignments. This question relates to a quote found on page 225 of Reading Lolita in Tehran. What do I believe is more important, happiness or self respect?

At first glance this question seems to pose a pretty straightforward answer, yet as I thought about it, the idea relates pretty closely to me. I think that happiness has to start from the deepest depths of ourselves. True happiness at least and this to me would encompass self respect. Yet I think there is a large difference in being happy and being content. I say this because in the beginning of the paragraph that this quote is found, Nafisi when describing James’s characters, says the protagonists are unhappy yet have an aura of victory at the end of the novels. To me, by gaining self respect pride should show through therefore showing happiness. This sentence seemed to give a feeling of the characters being content rather than truly happy. She goes on to say that it has more to do with a settling of oneself. Though I think this idea is a pretty good base to happiness, how do you know your happy is you can’t acknowledge yourself.

Now I know as all things, happiness is never that simple. Many factors of our lives play a part in our attitudes and demeanors. Though I do think that self respect is key in our overall happiness. We all have bad days but as I said that true happiness is inside. Yet if we can’t look ourselves in the mirror in the morning, happiness is the last feeling bursting inside. Self respect is that ability to look at yourself and be happy with the decisions you’ve made or the battles you’ve waged. We all have our sense of right and wrong- and deep down inside the respect for ourselves is either there or not. Often times we need reinforcement, whether good or bad, it seems to be a reminder of our view of ourselves. Similar to this I think when Nafisi talks about the difficulty of gaining self respect, it’s more so the fight of facing ourselves. Until one can overcome this there life will always remain, as Nafisi quotes “as it were.”

We can often spend our whole lives trying to be happy. Yet I think the key to true happiness is easier than many think. By being open to ourselves and brave enough to face a skeleton or two, we could achieve anything especially the happiness we chase. Having respect for ourselves expels confidence and radiates pride. Which in turn warms us with a gleeful pleasure. Therefore I feel you cant really have one without the other. The importance of happiness is self explanatory, yet the building bocks inside of us have to be solid before perusing such a pleasure.

Well that’s what I got, I will be bugging everyone soon.