Happiness

Do you ever feel like, when you’re really happy, that it’s just an illusion, that you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop? Like, you can’t possibly be happy like this for long; surely there’s got to be some really bad shit coming, right around the corner, to balance it all out? Well, I do. I keep feeling like that recently. Everything seems to be going my way and I keep going, “Ok, but what’s the catch?” It’s crazy how hard it is to accept happiness sometimes.

I mean, I fuckin’ deserve this right now. I’ve been in a really shitty place for a while. I mean suicidal thoughts kind of shitty place. That’s a pretty intense thing to admit out loud (or on the internet), but it’s true. I’ve just been feeling like this world as it stands doesn’t have a place for me. It’s not like I would ever actually kill myself. I enjoy things like orgasms and delicata squash and turquoise lakes in the Rocky Mountains and baking cookies and boobs and running and mushroom trips way too much for anything like that. But it’s so hard sometimes when you look at the big picture of life and don’t see anywhere that you fit in.

But. I just spent a few weeks around San Francisco, talking to friends and lovers, old and new, talking about anything and everything. Then hitched up the coast, through breathtakingly beautiful redwood forests, hung out on rocky windy beaches in northern California that felt like my childhood memories of Washington, met this adorable couple who basically adopted me for a few days, and ended up working on a family farm full of fresh, delicious food and wonderful people who seem to accept and welcome who I am. And have been getting a random influx of emails from people I love telling me in different ways that they respect me and think I’m awesome. And it all feels really really good.

Right now I feel like I can see how there is space in this world for people like me. Maybe even a need for us. When I forget to worry about how I’m going to fit in and just run with who I am, everything starts to work out.

But I definitely catch myself looking around, wondering when it’s all going to start feeling like shit again. Surely, at any moment, the feelings of being loved and accepted and useful and interesting are going to melt away and I’ll be left alone somewhere with malt liquor and cigarettes and depression.

I really want to turn that way of thinking around though. I could see it all (it being my life, the whole experience of being human) as a depressing struggle punctuated by brief periods of happiness. But I’d rather see it as a happy, beautiful experience with temporary periods of despair.

Cause really, those both describe the exact same picture. The math nerd in me wants to say they are isomorphic. And in that case, it seems just plain stupid to ever choose the first one.