An Hero
Member
- Nov 1, 2023
- 9
"Are you happy?"
On the surface, a simple question. Yes or no.
The default answer is to say yes and move the conversation along. Not because it's always yes, but because it's easier to not think about it. To walk past the dark chasm. It's impossible to see a problem when avoiding it altogether. When looking the other way. And should you stop, to see what can be seen, the longer you look the easier it is to fall in.
So, most of the time, when asked, I shrug, tell them sure, deflect. I know the hole is there. I just don't want to look.
But there's only so many times you can walk past the same sign, the same blemish, the same chasm in your heart, without stopping and taking a look. With every pass the intrigue grows. The chasm widens. The darkness deepens. The last time someone asked me if I was happy I opened my mouth, considered, then chewed at my lip. I looked into the hole, searched for something to hold onto. Something that would address the question, that would give the person asking me a glimmer of hope. But as I couldn't find what I wanted to find. So I offered them the only answer I could: the truth.
"I don't remember what it feels like to be happy."
Once upon a time, I was happy. I can flip back through the pages of my life and find it. Written in the same ink used to write the more recent chapters. Chapters now void of authentic happiness. The same ink. The same pen. So, I could, theoretically, write about it once again. I just can't remember how.
Licking my finger as I turn back the pages, I know what parts of my life are filled with some modicum of happiness. With authentic smiles and accurate laughter. With a semi-warmth in my heart and an overflowing soul. I don't ever think I've felt perfect andunconditional happiness. Yet perfect often is its own mask, much like the one I wore as the happiness I did feel began to fade, as it always does. Hurt is always just round the corner. Hiding the truth behind a smile and projecting myself to be happy, after all if you live it perhaps you'll become it no? Fake it 'till you make it.
But by the time I finally removed the mask, whatever happiness I once had no longer remained. An expired hourglass with nobody around to see the final grain of sand drop.
I don't know when my happiness fully disappeared. Would I have watched what remained fade away, its light growing dimmer along the horizon until nothing else remained? Or did it escape during the night, leaving me with nothing more than a bad dream and the weight of emotional self-abandonment?
Beyond it all, should it ever come back, will I even know it's there if it does?
It wasn't always like this. I know it wasn't. There's proof. Proof in that I remember being happy sometimes. I remember laughing without the depressed pull at the back of my skull. It's just been so long I can't remember what it means to be happy. What it takes. Or what made me happy.
It's a startling realization when you look inward and discover not only that you're not happy, but that you don't remember the last time you were. I grew up skating. Started at the age of ten. Skated almost every day through secondary school. Then I didn't skate forover a decade. Recently I purchased a skateboard and a pair of skates. Something I'd wanted for a while. When I went down to the skatepark, making sure it was early in the morning and would be empty, strapped on the skates or stood on the skateboard I couldn't connect to it. My brain was lost in physical translation, I couldn't connect it to my feet. I knew I'd done it before. I'd just forgotten.
The same is true with happiness.
What brings about happiness? What takes it away? Two specific questions with a billion unique answers. Your answers, if you have any, may differ from mine.
The loss of a partner and best friend. The loss of an entire family. The thought of a long winter alone. Failing at a relationship. Never feeling enough. The thought of another Christmas alone. A disappearing job and career. A pandemic. Not feeling safe in any area of my life. It's impossible to know which snowflake started the
avalanche. But then it doesn't matter. Every single one attributed to the downfall.
When reading those old pages, the crinkled, torn pages of my life, stained with as much blood as writing ink, I genuinely cannot remember when I last felt happy or safe. This fills me with an even more desolate sense of deep and dark sadness.
I assumed the fabric of my life couldn't be tainted. It couldn't be stained. I didn't realize how it would unravel with one pull of a loose thread. And now, years and years later, I'm not even sure where the thread is.
There are moments I feel more than the pain I write about. The pain I keep in. Small glimmers of something. Maybe the moments are nothing.
Maybe the moments are everything.
The look my faithful dog gives me when he needs help climbing a large step. After he's tried and failed to make it. The feeling of him as he crawls next to me on a cold night. The gentle kicks he gives me as he settles down feeling happy and safe. At least I can feel it vicariously through him. I picked him up from a farm outside Canberra when he was a mere 10 weeks old and we have a special bond because of it. I don't know what I'd do without him and I am petrified of what will happen to me when he does finally walk the Rainbow Bridge. I selfishly ask and pray for him to stick around until I feel safe, and secure and I can remember what it feels like to feel a little bit happy.
There's the feeling of sitting behind the wheel of my car, early in the morning, sunlight not yet bleaching over the landscape, but instead a pale lavender inks over the sky like spilled watercolour. The open road ahead of me and a coffee in hand. It can be the worst tasting coffee, burnt remnants of whatever beans were left from the day before, and yet the coffee, the sky, the road, it all comes together. It remains until that cold and empty dark pain pulls from the back of my skull and swirls my stomach up into the old familiar knot.
We all have our own happiness. Maybe yours is seeing the face of a friend you haven't seen in a long time. Perhaps it's hearing a favourite song or tasting a favourite dish. It can transport a mind to anywhere and everywhere. I don't know if these are mine. I can'tremember.
Should happiness return, I wonder if I'll see it coming. If I'll see the first streaks of light as it lifts over the horizon, or if, one day, I'll simply wake up and it will be a cloudless sky, the world around me fully illuminated.
It's impossible to say.
Perhaps you've been through something similar. Maybe, at one point in your life, you forgot the feeling of happiness. It left like a passing wind, and by the time you realized what you had lost, you didn't know where to begin looking for it. Hopefully, it eventually came back to you.
I can't tell you where to look, or what to do to retrieve it. Because your happiness is different from mine, as is its path back to you. Perhaps, just as it slowly left it will return in kind. It's possible it's currently doing that right now, filling you up, filling me up, bit by bit. Strand by strand. Happy moment by happy moment.
If it ever returns, I'll do whatever I can to cherish it. To breathe it in and let it fill me. Because I know what it's like to lose the feeling. I've forgotten happiness. Hopefully, happiness hasn't forgotten me.
Looking at it, I don't know when it all faded away. Honestly, at this point it doesn't matter. It's pointless to pinpoint it because it won't change where I'm at right now. Besides, what's the point of trying to figure out what made me so unhappy. I'd rather try to focus on discovering what can teach me how to be happy again. How to be happy again.
Because upon a time I was happy. Even a little bit. I just need to remember what made it possible.
On the surface, a simple question. Yes or no.
The default answer is to say yes and move the conversation along. Not because it's always yes, but because it's easier to not think about it. To walk past the dark chasm. It's impossible to see a problem when avoiding it altogether. When looking the other way. And should you stop, to see what can be seen, the longer you look the easier it is to fall in.
So, most of the time, when asked, I shrug, tell them sure, deflect. I know the hole is there. I just don't want to look.
But there's only so many times you can walk past the same sign, the same blemish, the same chasm in your heart, without stopping and taking a look. With every pass the intrigue grows. The chasm widens. The darkness deepens. The last time someone asked me if I was happy I opened my mouth, considered, then chewed at my lip. I looked into the hole, searched for something to hold onto. Something that would address the question, that would give the person asking me a glimmer of hope. But as I couldn't find what I wanted to find. So I offered them the only answer I could: the truth.
"I don't remember what it feels like to be happy."
Once upon a time, I was happy. I can flip back through the pages of my life and find it. Written in the same ink used to write the more recent chapters. Chapters now void of authentic happiness. The same ink. The same pen. So, I could, theoretically, write about it once again. I just can't remember how.
Licking my finger as I turn back the pages, I know what parts of my life are filled with some modicum of happiness. With authentic smiles and accurate laughter. With a semi-warmth in my heart and an overflowing soul. I don't ever think I've felt perfect andunconditional happiness. Yet perfect often is its own mask, much like the one I wore as the happiness I did feel began to fade, as it always does. Hurt is always just round the corner. Hiding the truth behind a smile and projecting myself to be happy, after all if you live it perhaps you'll become it no? Fake it 'till you make it.
But by the time I finally removed the mask, whatever happiness I once had no longer remained. An expired hourglass with nobody around to see the final grain of sand drop.
I don't know when my happiness fully disappeared. Would I have watched what remained fade away, its light growing dimmer along the horizon until nothing else remained? Or did it escape during the night, leaving me with nothing more than a bad dream and the weight of emotional self-abandonment?
Beyond it all, should it ever come back, will I even know it's there if it does?
It wasn't always like this. I know it wasn't. There's proof. Proof in that I remember being happy sometimes. I remember laughing without the depressed pull at the back of my skull. It's just been so long I can't remember what it means to be happy. What it takes. Or what made me happy.
It's a startling realization when you look inward and discover not only that you're not happy, but that you don't remember the last time you were. I grew up skating. Started at the age of ten. Skated almost every day through secondary school. Then I didn't skate forover a decade. Recently I purchased a skateboard and a pair of skates. Something I'd wanted for a while. When I went down to the skatepark, making sure it was early in the morning and would be empty, strapped on the skates or stood on the skateboard I couldn't connect to it. My brain was lost in physical translation, I couldn't connect it to my feet. I knew I'd done it before. I'd just forgotten.
The same is true with happiness.
What brings about happiness? What takes it away? Two specific questions with a billion unique answers. Your answers, if you have any, may differ from mine.
The loss of a partner and best friend. The loss of an entire family. The thought of a long winter alone. Failing at a relationship. Never feeling enough. The thought of another Christmas alone. A disappearing job and career. A pandemic. Not feeling safe in any area of my life. It's impossible to know which snowflake started the
avalanche. But then it doesn't matter. Every single one attributed to the downfall.
When reading those old pages, the crinkled, torn pages of my life, stained with as much blood as writing ink, I genuinely cannot remember when I last felt happy or safe. This fills me with an even more desolate sense of deep and dark sadness.
I assumed the fabric of my life couldn't be tainted. It couldn't be stained. I didn't realize how it would unravel with one pull of a loose thread. And now, years and years later, I'm not even sure where the thread is.
There are moments I feel more than the pain I write about. The pain I keep in. Small glimmers of something. Maybe the moments are nothing.
Maybe the moments are everything.
The look my faithful dog gives me when he needs help climbing a large step. After he's tried and failed to make it. The feeling of him as he crawls next to me on a cold night. The gentle kicks he gives me as he settles down feeling happy and safe. At least I can feel it vicariously through him. I picked him up from a farm outside Canberra when he was a mere 10 weeks old and we have a special bond because of it. I don't know what I'd do without him and I am petrified of what will happen to me when he does finally walk the Rainbow Bridge. I selfishly ask and pray for him to stick around until I feel safe, and secure and I can remember what it feels like to feel a little bit happy.
There's the feeling of sitting behind the wheel of my car, early in the morning, sunlight not yet bleaching over the landscape, but instead a pale lavender inks over the sky like spilled watercolour. The open road ahead of me and a coffee in hand. It can be the worst tasting coffee, burnt remnants of whatever beans were left from the day before, and yet the coffee, the sky, the road, it all comes together. It remains until that cold and empty dark pain pulls from the back of my skull and swirls my stomach up into the old familiar knot.
We all have our own happiness. Maybe yours is seeing the face of a friend you haven't seen in a long time. Perhaps it's hearing a favourite song or tasting a favourite dish. It can transport a mind to anywhere and everywhere. I don't know if these are mine. I can'tremember.
Should happiness return, I wonder if I'll see it coming. If I'll see the first streaks of light as it lifts over the horizon, or if, one day, I'll simply wake up and it will be a cloudless sky, the world around me fully illuminated.
It's impossible to say.
Perhaps you've been through something similar. Maybe, at one point in your life, you forgot the feeling of happiness. It left like a passing wind, and by the time you realized what you had lost, you didn't know where to begin looking for it. Hopefully, it eventually came back to you.
I can't tell you where to look, or what to do to retrieve it. Because your happiness is different from mine, as is its path back to you. Perhaps, just as it slowly left it will return in kind. It's possible it's currently doing that right now, filling you up, filling me up, bit by bit. Strand by strand. Happy moment by happy moment.
If it ever returns, I'll do whatever I can to cherish it. To breathe it in and let it fill me. Because I know what it's like to lose the feeling. I've forgotten happiness. Hopefully, happiness hasn't forgotten me.
Looking at it, I don't know when it all faded away. Honestly, at this point it doesn't matter. It's pointless to pinpoint it because it won't change where I'm at right now. Besides, what's the point of trying to figure out what made me so unhappy. I'd rather try to focus on discovering what can teach me how to be happy again. How to be happy again.
Because upon a time I was happy. Even a little bit. I just need to remember what made it possible.
