How to stay happy when you don't want to be

I want it. You want it. We ALL want it. We're just searching for a way to have it. Happiness.

I've come to believe that happiness is not a place that I am trying to get to. Rather it's a choice that I have to make to BE. I want to BE happy, not have happiness. Thinking that I can have it, to exercise control over it, is unrealistic and utterly impossible.

The problem is that in order to know what being happy is about, you have to experience unhappiness. I've experienced a lot of it in my life, and I've fallen into a sort of Catch-22 situation. I'm so used to being unhappy that I'm afraid to choose the other side. Because when you're in a bad place, you know you where you are. You're at the bottom, and anything else that happens has to be good. Once you're in a good place the only place left to go is down. So I want to be happy, but I don't want to risk the chance of unhappiness occurring again.

It's easier to choose misery because choosing to be happy requires so much inner strength and I'm not sure I have that quite yet.