you get to be happy

A few weekends ago, I was driving down CA-2 to meet friends for what has become a quarterly dinner. That is how it goes in Los Angeles. After weeks and strings of text messages, you finally get a date on the calendar. Your place or mine? Takeout or potluck? I’ll bring the wine and that [insert item] I’ve been meaning to give you.

I’m not a great cook, but somehow I managed to make homemade dumplings with shredded carrots and just enough sesame oil. The dinner theme was hot pot. One friend brought a chocolate dessert made with miso paste; the one who hosted set the table with peanut sauces, fresh veggies, a plate of blue shrimp. We lit the pilot on the small camp stove in the center of the dining table. Watched the broth bubble. Poured the wine.

I’m usually in my head for these sorts of things—for social gatherings. That is to say, I’m usually always in my head. But I felt happy on this particular night. It started while driving down the freeway on the way to dinner, the cool air slipping through the window crack, the song a perfect mix of moody. The sky turned to ink, and I felt an unfamiliar lightness watching headlights bounce off concrete medians. Suddenly, I was sixteen.

Everything was about finding happiness back then, like riding blocks of ice down hills at the park until the skin beneath our jeans turned pink. My friends and I grew bored more often than not, but we could find contentment anywhere, doing anything—picking blades of grass, drinking Sonic slushies, and belting songs in the car.

We found happiness in our bodies too. It was so much easier at that age. Sure, there were the usual teenage girl woes and afternoons of dark emotions, but our stomachs filled with butterflies more often than not as we held our boyfriends’ hands, kissed them for hours in parked cars.

Happiness was abundant, and it was everywhere. And it came so easily, spoiling us without cost.

*

At dinner, I allowed myself to sit in the happiness as long as it would let me. When other emotions tried to slip in, I shut them out, told them to come back later. It felt good to get buzzed and enjoy inconsequential conversations without my usual anxieties creeping in. It was dinner. Gossip. Catching up on life. Being together just to be together.

When I left, I couldn’t stop thinking about how happy I felt, but also how long it had been since I’d felt that way. I don’t know how to be happy on purpose anymore. I can’t simply put the feeling on. It’s too evasive. Drowned out by deep emotions, big adult feelings that take up too much space in my mind and body. Anxiety, worry, loss, empathy, and joy too. These feelings require so much more of me.

Perhaps it’s also because I’m more comfortable with complexity in my adult years, though this may not always be a good thing. More recently, I’ve noticed I prefer to be overwhelmed by my feelings rather than to let them go. There is a strange sort of comfort and control in turning your feelings over and over again, in analyzing them from every angle. To let them go—to allow yourself to be happy—is much more challenging.

Happiness seems too easy, something reserved for childhood or people who don’t wallow in their feelings. (The phrase “happy-go-lucky” comes to mind.) If I’m being truly honest, I’ve turned my nose up to the idea of being happy more than once because it seems like such a simple, even shallow, feeling.

Happiness may not offer deep fulfillment or love or even pleasure, but there is a lightness there, a simplicity in choosing to “be happy” despite complex emotions. Sure, happiness is more fleeting than emotions like joy or peace, which require more cultivation, but I’m not so sure that means we shouldn’t still seek it out for ourselves regularly.

When you feel happy, you also learn to breathe again. Your mind becomes a bit safer. The world becomes surprisingly quiet. Suddenly, you find yourself smiling just because, all the while, your worries and fears tuck themselves into the back of your brain for later. You feel like you again. You remember what it means to just be, even if you’re not okay, even if you’re exhausted or defeated or grieving. You let the happiness slip in for a second, and you allow yourself to feel it. It’s not profound or meaningful. But it works like magic, healing open wounds and reconnecting you to your body.

The point is that it doesn’t matter so much how it works or if it works at all. All that matters is, for a single moment, you get to let go. You get to set down the load you always carry. And you get to be happy.

Even if it’s just a moment, you get to be happy.

---

Weekly Feels

• “Hard moments do not last forever.” This beautiful meditation from yung pueblo.

• The moody song referenced in the piece.

• This exceptional and breath-stealing video that I’ve watched 100x already:

  _nelly_london

  

  A post shared by N E L L Y L O N D O N (@_nelly_london)