I am happy

I feel like I should save this one for last, but I am sticking to the list. Yes, I am happy. There is a post that will be following this one that might suggest otherwise, but all I have to say is that I am happier than I have ever been and it isn’t for just one reason alone. Every day holds something new and something old for me. For so long, I was working toward a goal, but because I was so afraid that life’s bottom would fall out, I was always afraid to really envision the fruits of my labors.

The first time I allowed myself to admit that I was happy, I did it in a whisper, and then I looked for the world to come crashing in on me. I was driving down Poplar on my way home right where I pass by the burger place and East High School. Nothing all that special had happened that day, and there wasn’t anything all the inspired at home. I was just driving, well sitting at a red light, and this really happy rush just sort of bubbled up inside me. Before I ducked and ran from it (metaphorically of course), I just named it. I thought to myself, “I am happy.”

I am pretty sure I waited for the end of it for a while, because it was a few weeks before I tried the words out again. In fact, I said them out loud. I was doing laundry on a Friday when Nathan was at school and I didn’t have to go to work, and I just said it. “I am happy.”

Look, y’all. I haven’t lost my mind. I was just programmed to believe that happy people are rich and thin and gorgeous. I was never taught to believe that happiness was something I could experience, and that is the rub and one of my more important discoveries.

Happiness is not a place, it is not a plane of existence, it is not a Mecca at the end of a perilous journey. Happiness is a feeling that we allow ourselves to find. It is there on the drive home, it is there in the laundry room, and it is even there when the world does come crashing in on me. As I move away from the sadness I have known and the work I have done, I realize that even in the past I was happy, and that by not allowing myself to experience it, I closed a lot of doors in my own face.

There were times when it was pointed out to me that I was a real pain to be around, and I am sure that these thoughts are still true of me from time to time. I was afraid. I am not afraid anymore. The world moves the way it moves and I am somewhere in it. The good that this life has for me will be evened out by the bad. I have to make sure that I can feel the happiness in every moment even when it seems impossible to find.