What happy people don’t know and what sad people won’t tell you is that happiness–brash, unapologetic contentment–takes some getting used to. You do not shoot upright in bed one morning and think, “Oh, now I am happy.” It’s a mollasses process, slow, a kind of emotional osmosis; one week you are crumpled in a laundry heap crying because you cannot find your favorite pair of red tights, and the next you are at the breakfast table kissing someone your heart swoops jaggedly for, toast tumbling awkwardly out of the sides of your mouth. For someone used to cataloging and analyzing emotions, appreciating happiness as I feel it does not come easily: I’m much better at picking at the seams until I am standing in a puddle of yarn, unable to remember what it was that made me happy in the first place.
Arriving at contentment is like relocating to a strange city; I know a lot about the latter and practically nothing about the former. Here I am in San Francisco, with two suitcases, dirty hair and my black and white cat. Here I am at happiness, relearning how to sleep beside someone and booking two plane tickets and calling my father to say, “I think I love him.” (To which he replies: “What’s this boy’s social security number?”)
The truth is that I am awful at being happy, which is why I frequently behave ruinously, striking matches in places where no fire is necessary. There is some comfort in having the control to destroy something myself; at least then I avoid the anxiety of some amorphous specter sidling in and scooping up everything I’ve built. I am skeptical of my own contentment, constantly looking over my shoulder to catch whoever might be there to rip everything out from under me. True satisfaction with life and my place in it has always been fleeting; I don’t expect it to last longer than a small stretch of lovely lilac months. When discontentment resurfaces, I feel more relief than disappointment. There is a line I scrawled in a high school diary just after I started taking anti-depressants: “I miss the comfort of being sad,” it read. Being happy feels a lot like living in a foreign city or watching a television show in a different language. For me, being happy feels a lot like holding your breath under water for a very long time: that delicate anxiety, that earnestness.
I don’t plan on coming up for air any time soon.
Wow, that sounds so like me a few years ago. Especially “striking matches in places where no fire is necessary.” If it helps any, it gets easier to be happy with being happy.