Ouch! It hurts to smile, like my face will crack under the pressure of me even thinking about it. This feeling is melancholy. Melancholy it's the face I make when I’m thinking too hard. Google describes melancholy as “a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause”, but to me it’s more like a state of seriousness.

Sadly, melancholy tends to be a predominant mood for me. I’m not a very serious person and I don’t think of myself as “depressed” but melancholy is the mood I find myself in the most. This mood does affect others; it’s like the elephant in the room. While everyone else is smiling and laughing I feel like I’m stuck. I find myself wondering in the back of my mind if it's appropriate for me to join in on the laugher and the smiles? I feel it shouldn’t have to be like that; I want laughing and smiling to come natural to me, not to be something I have force or question.

The mood that I wish to obtain is pure happiness. Happiness isn’t hard for me to get it’s just hard for me to express it like how others do. It feels strange for me to smile. Somedays it’s just too much work; I can’t fake a feeling I have no concept of.

My goal is to throw away this feeling of melancholy. I know in order to achieve this goal it’s going to be hard because melancholy is a feeling my body is so used to. I have gotten in the habit of frowning and looking gloomy. But I promise myself one day it’ll all be in the past and I WILL find my happiness and cherish it for all the days to come.