What’s Your Happiness Tied To?

“They told me all of my cages were mental” - T. Swift

I grew up never being asked if I was happy. I didn’t realize this was strange until I got older. I took it as fact that since my family didn’t do feelings, no one else did. They didn’t talk about the hard or the good, so I never thought to even have those conversations with myself let alone someone else.

In retrospect I understand that my family mostly just strived for survival and any extra time in the day was spent sleeping, eating, or going down different spirals that would become intergenerational trauma.

I say this with little judgement because from my family I’ve learned we’re all just trying our best, even when someone else’s best isn’t necessarily how you would do it or live it or heal it.

Back when I could still go to therapy in a Brooklyn brownstone, instead of up against the pillows on my bed, I used to stare at my therapist’s feet as I navigated an answer to her, “Are you happy? Does this make you happy?” questions.

Acknowledging whether I am happy or not has always made me feel like an amateur at my own life. Even now, when staring directly into my therapist’s eyes by way of a screen, I still clam up.

Secretly, I would feel so ashamed because why would someone clam up if they were happy? Was there something I wasn’t admitting to myself? Deep down I thought maybe I was unhappy and I just hadn’t found a way to say it. Turns out, it was the opposite.

Unfamiliarity with calling a feeling out for what it is means you don’t have a dictionary for it. It also means you shouldn’t expect yourself to be an expert at noticing when it pops up. Happiness for me is a foreign tingle that follows the length of my spine up to my heart and my head. I mistaken it often for the feeling of fear that I am familiar with, the one with the tingle that follows my spine down straight to the pit of my stomach.

I think there’s a power of asking questions that we’ve never asked before, like:

“Am I happy? What does happiness feel like for me? How do I know I’m in it? How do I handle maybe being afraid of it?”

I think there needs to be a grace to understanding that the answers aren’t often immediate and that especially when it comes to happiness they are so ever-changing that you need to embrace a flexible definition.

For a really long time, I’d mistaken happiness as the rush I get from being incredibly productive or from my highly functional, adrenaline sparked anxiety. Those highs being so fleeting meant I defined happiness by the chase.

There’s a sustainability in happiness that we should all be striving for. The details of what “makes up” happiness will always change, but the beauty in the feeling itself is how grounding and peaceful it can be no matter the circumstances.

The question I’ve been sitting with the most lately is “what am I attaching my happiness to?”and I’m working to add on “why?” to that.

There are so many opportunities for us to realize that a large range of definitions for “happiness” exist. We shouldn’t settle for labeling happiness onto anything that asks us to prove our worthiness first. It’s okay to want happiness based on things that are anchored to who you are instead of a result of who you need to be to earn them.

Having to learn this as an adult has felt embarrassing at times. It’s been healing to realize we’re all still learning or relearning this lesson over and over again.