Recently I had a powerful moment of realizing that the only reason I felt worried and sad about not having a powerful happy experience was that I expected to be judged for not having a happier, more joyful time.
Without that expectation of judgment, I would have simply floated in a vast unselfconscious peace having no detectable emotional valence. Which, I got, was completely ok with me. My core did not desire anything more. In fact, this nothingness felt a lot like effortless bliss.
In my life, fear of judgment has been a most powerful jailor. I am done with letting it control me so I would simply like to state, for the record: being a happy person is not one of my goals. Increasing my happiness is not one of my priorities. Furthermore, as a goal, it strikes me as pointless: if I am not happy, and my goal is to be happy, then I am not ok with how I am now, which is a sure-fire recipe for unhappiness.
Inner peace and the ability to be with whatever feelings arise in me are of far greater importance to me than the desire to be happy.
Happy seems to require an awful lot of energy. I’d rather be content. I’d rather focus on increasing my capacity for gratitude, even when I feel shitty, than on increasing my feelings of happiness. How I feel is largely out of my control. How I respond to those feelings is my own choice.
I prefer to expend my energy in becoming a more fearless person, rather than a happier one.
Becoming more open and vulnerable makes me feel anything but happy. Regardless, I choose to push toward openness and vulnerability even though the pushing brings up deep sorrow and rage.
I am more interested in leaning into the uncomfortable tensions of uncertainty, ambivalence, and paradox than I am in feeling happy in the moment.
Not so long ago, I was a fairly bitter, miserable person who fantasized awfully frequently about an early death and being invisible. These days I am a much more content and peaceful person. I imagine I will never, ever be the kind of person that other people see and categorize as “a happy person.”And maybe it’s that more than anything else that I’m realizing and admitting publicly that I don’t care about.
Because the truth is that becoming able to hold and soothe your own emotions, being content, cultivating gratitude, facing down fears, tolerating uncertainty/ambivalence/paradox, and being able to be vulnerable are all keys to increasing happiness. But that’s not really why I do them. They give me something that is within my power to do and are sure to dispel the completely barren landscape of misery even if they don’t bear the ultimate fruit of joy.
As I write this I get that it’s like the difference between being focused on wanting to eat ripe tomatoes from your back yard, and wanting to tend the garden. You can’t make tomatoes happen, but you can do the work that supports their growth. If you really want and value the process of that work, regardless of outcome, then the tomatoes are a tremendous gift at the end, but lack of tomatoes isn’t devastating. Focus on the tomatoes alone, and if they don’t happen, it was all a waste.
And I do experience not infrequent washes of joy. Great amusement. Flow in play. These are just rather fleeting experiences. And they are interspersed with neutral states, as well as sadness and anger. And I don’t want my internal experience to be a game of chase. So I don’t focus on needing more happy.
And I won’t put energy into self-consciously adding inauthentic layers of external expression over my internal experience so that other people will read me as “happy.” And I will no longer feel like I’m obligated to do so or wrong for not being concerned with it.
Freedom. Authenticity. Power. Yes.