Pursuit of happiness

On a lazy morning when I was feeling down, I kept questioning when it would be my turn to be happy and when I would get everything that I wanted. The more I complained about everything and felt sorry for myself, this idea kept on taking shape: Who said that everybody has to be happy? Who says that everybody has to have a happy ever after?

Every single self-help book sells the idea of happiness. Do this and in 21 simple steps, you will be happier. “The Secret” goes even further and says how you need to put your intentions out there and that the universe will realign itself to make every wish come true and if it hasn’t, it just means that you didn’t want it hard enough. People are buying crystals and trying to manifest the life they want and even more, the life they think they are owed. Just one more thing and I will be happy. If I get this one thing then it will be enough. Sometimes you get it, and you are so happy and then you post it on Instagram, Facebook, whatever, but you don’t get the likes you want, so you get a bit sad because you thought you were happy, and you wanted people to be happy for you or to be just a little tiny bit jealous, cause is it not enough if other people don’t watch you, is it? It seems that the concept has stayed the same, but the unit of measurement keeps changing. What was enough yesterday just lost its lustre a little bit today. Derren Brown said in his book, “Happy”, that if you buy a house, it will bring you immense joy but, in six months, your brain will more or less get used to the change and it no longer registers as such.

If you come to think about it, happiness makes one content. If one is content, one does not have a strong drive to progress, and it makes you less aware of dangers. Thinking about it from an evolutionary point of view, we needed to be always on guard for survival so, I assume that if we relaxed completely, a wild animal would have eaten us. Does that make any sense? I am making this up as I am going along. Wolves do not chase us anymore but we are haunted by the fear that we might lose it all.

Before I used to say that all I wanted was to be happy but now when I stop to think about it, I am not entirely sure what happiness looks like for me. I suppose you can’t reach a goal if you don’t know what the goal is. On a simple level, happiness is the absence of pain, fear, or any other negative emotion for that matter. Our brain is certainly geared up to keep us safe and away from anything that is perceived to be negative but how realistic is that goal? Good and bad experiences come and go. Something always happens and things will not happen exactly how we want them to so, how would we ever just have good experiences? I find that if you try to keep all bad experiences away and take only the safe decisions, the ones that always give you the results you want, you will also keep good experiences away.

I know these people that have a plan for what they want. They have a clear idea of everything that they want to achieve in this lifetime and how they are going to get there. They have clear goals, and they are going after them. Always taking steps to promote that end goal. You see it with some celebrities as well. They just had this one thing that they were always good at, and they believed that they had this light in them, so they persevered no matter the setbacks. I always looked at those people with envy. I never had that clear line of what I want to be, I never had a clear life goal and how everything will happen for me. I have done this questionnaire that was meant to help me with my personal brand and one of the things that they were asking was what was unique about me, and what would have not happened the same if I had not been there. I kept thinking about it, and I couldn’t say what was special about me. I think that people would have achieved things and while I love to get involved and contribute, I wouldn’t know what makes me unique. I hate this question as much as I hate the one about interesting things people should know about me.

If I look back, one of the wishes I had growing up, was to meet my prince charming, get married, and have a family of my own. I suppose that is the propaganda Disney was pushing since every princess was meeting their amazing man and getting married and then they lived happily ever after. I had this image of living in marital bliss. We would do things together and we would not fight but, we would have discussions instead. We would support each other and grow together so both can achieve our goals. He would never hold me too tight because he would know that he was the first one I wanted to share my achievements and sorrows. Later on, I have added the idea of children. A boy and a girl. I thought about it so much that I considered names, and they took shape in my head. I could hear their laughter, and I could picture them in my head running towards me. They would love me, and I would love them. Armed with the fantasy of my future family, I entered the dating world and met people who were not Prince Charming. I figured that one has to kiss quite a few frogs before one gets her prince and I had read that story too so, I was playing the long game. The years passed though, everybody else got married, and everybody else had children, and I am still searching. While I tried to keep my spirits up, at some point the doubt crept in that maybe, just maybe, marital bliss might not be in the cards for me, nor might motherhood. The years are passing, and the clock is running down, I might be able to influence quite a few things, but I cannot fight the passage of time. This image being so far from my grasp is causing me a lot of pain and the only way I can be happy is to let it go, to accept this idea of destiny and things happening for a reason, to accept that if it meant to be it will happen and no matter how much I push, or try to force it, it might never happen.

The next big one was having a job. I somehow felt that because I was small and didn’t have any money, I also had little choice in what I did and how I lived but, if I had money, I could live how I wanted to live. My dad was a very big fan of telling me that while I lived under his roof, I would do as he said, I always had that sense of wanting my own home. As a child, I thought I could be anything that I wanted so, I would watch TV and dream the dreams of possibility. I wanted to be a ballet dancer at first since being a princess seemed a bit out of reach. I would see them glide with such grace and I wanted that to be me. When I mentioned to my mom, I got to hear how expensive everything was in terms of training and hard work so, it seems less and less possible that I would be a ballet dancer. I also wanted to be a PE teacher or a couch and that one fell away on his own. Life proved that I was better at intellectual endeavours than physical things so, what can one do? I also thought of being a lawyer after watching Law and Order and Ally McBeal. To be strong, confident, and come up with just the right answer at the right time and win everybody over. I figured that there would be a lot to remember and I am terrible at memorizing things if I don’t have a direct interest in them plus, the laws change so, it would be a lifetime endeavour to keep up with them and I was also terribly shy so since I couldn’t speak in a group, grandstanding in a courtroom didn’t quite seem like a thing I could do.

When I went to university, my dream was to be an interpreter. I had hoped that I would go around the world and translate at conferences or books which was right up the alley of my liking to read. In my last year, a teacher asked me what I wanted to be and when I told her, she told me I was in the wrong course and that they make teachers there, not interpreters. I am so glad that they took my money for four years and never asked the question. I had been offered a job when I was in my third year which I would have been happy to take but, I didn’t have the same teacher in my last year and her offer never got renewed. I tried to find a job on my own when I finished my degree, and everybody was asking for at least 6 months on the job or I didn’t do as well as I expected when it came to the tests they sent me. I kept on going and I found a corporate job. They were impressed with my language skills, so I started to work for the UK&I. Having an ear for accents helped me in the beginning since I sounded English and then helped me when I moved to Scotland because I started to sound reasonably Scottish. This might not have been the dream but, I finally had a way to make money.

I know what everybody is going to say. Money doesn’t bring happiness. That is correct. Money itself doesn’t bring happiness, but it surely does bring peace of mind. Health is one of the most important things so think about getting ill and not having enough money to buy medicine or get an operation that can improve the quality of your life. Having that money would bring happiness. Putting food on the table is also important so, while some people talk about going to Michelin-star restaurants to have the most expensive mouth bites for the experience, some people dream of just having the essentials every day without having to struggle. Back to my dreams though. I had wanted to travel and see the world but while I was making money, I wasn’t making enough money to just through a dart at the map and go anywhere it may take me which has always been my dream also, I found that the idea to travel alone terrified me and I wished that I had a buddy that I could travel the world with. I was terrified that I might get there, my wallet was going to be stolen and I would have no way to return home, and I would be stuck, and that fear paralyzed me. I also dreamed of having my own house. It doesn’t have to be huge because I consider the time to clean it, but my own house would give me so much freedom. Not having to ask permission from everyone whenever I have to do or change something. It will always reflect my desire and here comes money again because it seems like it is a far dream to have a house on my own in today’s economy. I might have enough money to buy it but what if anything breaks and my insurance won’t cover the repairs? Problems are so much easier to deal with if you have money to throw at them.

I am not saying that money is the answer to everything, of course, it isn’t. When I am at my lowest, I don’t want any food, I don’t want any water, I don’t want to get off the floor let alone travel the world. In those moments, I only want one thing and that is peace. I wish I had a way to quiet my thoughts, I wish for a way to find rest and stop my thoughts from overwhelming me. I wish I had a way to live without fear every single moment of my life. When something happens, I feel weaves of panic and sorrow reverberating all over my body and I am crumbling on the inside. I feel the need to lie on the floor because emotionally, there is no way I can get any lower. I feel so much pain and shame in my chest that I feel it might get crushed sometimes. My dreams are of me waking up, resting, stretching, and enjoying the morning sunshine on my face. My body is free of tension and my mind is not racing, I am just in the moment, and I am just observing my life as it unfolds. I would make a cup of tea and maybe some breakfast while I watch the birds in the trees, the cats running around from yard to yard, and people just going about their busy lives. I have things to do but there is plenty of time to do everything that’s scheduled. My mind is so peaceful, no torture from the past I can’t change, no fear from the future I can’t control, just contentment that I can face everything that the present moment brings to me. In this dream, I wouldn’t feel like I am failing all the time, I wouldn’t feel like a fraud, I wouldn’t feel like everything is happening to me because I am a bad person. I wouldn’t worry that everybody leaves me or just never quite gets who I am because I am happy within myself. In this dream, I can wake up, brush my teeth, feed myself three meals a day, listen to my body, and take care of myself without a problem. While I have people around me, I don’t feel like they are more important in my life than I am, that they know better what I need than I do. In this dream, I love myself so much that I build the life that I want no matter the risks.

I understand that nobody feels like this all the time, but I wish I could have that at least sometimes because I find myself walking for hours and I feel like there is nowhere to rest because I am not safe anywhere and no matter where I try to sit, I will not be safe. I walk because I don’t know what else to do but I still can’t calm the struggle that is inside me. I wish I could just find the perfect solution, the perfect switch, and then, boom, I am just everything that I ever wanted to be. I wish I understood how other people experience life because it feels lonely to feel like I am struggling while other people just know what to do. I wish that I could feel and experience the world as someone else, like a mind meld from Star Trek, so I can understand what they felt and what their emotional world was like and understand if their struggles resemble mine and then I wouldn’t feel so alien. I would be able to find a middle ground where I would accept my feelings for what they are and deal with them better.

I don’t know if I will ever achieve happiness the way I want it and if it comes if I can hold onto it for long. One thing I understand is that what happiness looks like is different for each individual and that it changes throughout our lives based on our priorities at the time. At the moment, I am happy that I have someone to whom I can tell my worries, with whom I can be fully honest about my fears, and they tell me that I will be fine, and because they believe it, I believe it too and I can keep going on.