My best friend and I, like many people my age, discuss what exactly we want in our life and what we think the future will hold for us. A couple of weeks ago, I told her that I just wanted to find someone who made me ridiculously happy. She then replied with, "Why do you just want to be happy when you deserve so much more?" I didn't really put much thought into what she said at the moment until I went to bed later that night. The more I thought about her comment the more I started to rethink my answer. Was happiness all that I really desired in my life? Is that the only purpose we have in our short time here on this earth? Live 'happily ever after?'

The simplicity of just being happy seems innocent enough. We desire to be happy because of the fairytales that we read as children. So many little girls dream that one day, when they are older, their knight in shining armor will show up on a white horse and whisk them away into the sunset, where they will get married and live happily ever after. Don't lie, at some point or other it was your dream too.

It's nice to believe that life can be wrapped up in a little bow and defined in one word: happy. Here's the truth: happy is boring, plain and simple. We cannot keep ourselves confined to just being happy because this is reality and no matter how hard we want to disregard the truth, the world is out to get us. Reality doesn't want us to be happy and succeed.

However, that might not be the worst thing in the world. In Walt Disney's movie Enchanted, Giselle, the heroine, finds her prince and plans to be married in the morning, experience true love's kiss, and live happily ever after. On her wedding day, however, she is pushed down a well and sent to reality in New York City, where the evil queen says that "there are no... happily ever afters." As she first begins her journey, all she desires is to go back to her fantasy land with her prince and experience nothing else but pure bliss. When she begins to experience this new world around her, she learns that there is so much more to life, there are so many emotions to feel and things to see and that life is a very complex matter. It can never be as simple as to feel one emotion the rest of your life. She is even thrilled when she discovers that she is angry with someone, an emotion she has never felt in her life!

All of this to say, why should we just choose to be one thing for the rest of our lives? This is our only life we will ever have and we have the privilege, nay, the right, to do anything that we want to do with it. There is so much more to life than to live happily. We should step out of the comfort zone of 'happy' and dare to live out our dreams. Our emotions cannot be confined to one little box where we only let out one emotion at a time. We are allowed to be happy and sad, angry and elated, confused and heart broken and every other feeling on the spectrum because we are human and we are such complex and wonderful creatures. We should not be afraid to live bravely ever after. To live curiously ever after. To live adventurously ever after. To live passionately or humbly or anything else... ever after. This is my life, and I refuse to be content with just happy. Will you?