This morning while I was getting Starbucks, the cashier annoyed me to no end.
Why, you may ask?
She was just too excited. She had the biggest grin on her face, like giving me my Passion Tea drink was just the best part of her day. I do believe it could have been me not having enough caffeine in my body at the time to deal with someone’s exuberance, but it was also the fact that since I wasn’t in a good mood, anyone else being in that good of a mood was just annoying.
Usually my friends tell me I am that person. I’m the kind of person that is just happy, often for no reason. I’m usually found smiling, I skip when I walk sometimes and I just genuinely look on the bright side 99 percent of the time. This tends to annoy people, and now I can understand why.
I think as human beings, we tend to inflict our emotions onto other people, and we don’t mean to do it necessarily. It just kind of happens. I was just in a nasty mood earlier and that’s why I lashed out and got annoyed at the girl at Starbucks. My friends tell me to hush sometimes when I’m being super exuberant about something.
I think the classic argument of pessimism vs optimism comes into play here. I’m a pretty optimistic person, and sometimes people just don’t want to hear about how, “It’ll all be better soon.” Other times, people do need that.
I think the important thing to remember is the difference between sympathy vs. empathy and how to be able to navigate that in a conversation.
Sympathy is showing concern and trying to comfort them whereas empathy is saying you understand and you’ve been in that situation or know what that must feel like. I think we all need to learn how to be able to read the situation and be sympathetic or empathetic when need be.
The point of my column today is basically don’t judge someone else by their outward appearance of happiness. If someone wants to be happy, don’t question it, live and let live, man. In fact, let those people spread happiness in the world — it’s way better than spreading hate. We live in a world full of negativity and anguish, with poverty and hunger and increasingly bad taste in fashion and music. Each person brings a valuable outlook on life. Don’t shun their happiness just because you can’t give a name to why they may be happy.
If you think about it, we have a lot to be happy about, even if it takes reminders sometimes. Especially here at Baylor — we go to a prestigious university, we’ve got a lot going for us, even if there are a lot of issues in our life. The best thing to do sometimes is just smile. Start smiling more and express positive ideas and statements and be OK with people who have different opinions. I honestly think if we were just genuinely tried to be more happy in our day to day lives and “stopped to smell the roses,” we’d have a better future.
I feel like that girl in “Mean Girls” that doesn’t even go to this school and just has a lot of feelings, but at the same time maybe feelings is what’ll get us through this mad world.
Basically, you don’t need a reason to be happy and if you come upon someone who is happy for what seems like no reason, try not to brush your negativity onto them.
Mashaal Hashmi is a junior from Fort Worth. She is a copy editor for the Lariat.
