No caveats to happiness
If I had to explain it, I’d say it feels like I've just left the school disco in grade six. I’m in a cold sweat but the air is mild and endorphins are rushing through me at breakneck speed. It seems almost criminal, I think. I might have been roofied with something illicit earlier today. My barista could be dropping hallucinogens into my soy latte. Did someone embellish my danish with methamphetamines instead of blueberries? I can’t be sure. This feeling is foreign but welcomed and all-consuming. It courses through my body and filters through my lungs. It’s like someone’s rinsed out my brain and cleared the harddrive from all the corrupt files I’ve been storing in there. I feel light. I feel happy.
Happiness like this makes me guilty and anxious. I am waiting restlessly for something, anything, to go wrong. What will it be? I turn the key of my car and turn the volume up full throttle until the bass reverberates and thrums. Then I picture myself crashing into the car at the next intersection, glass breaking and my head hitting the windshield and a deluge of blood. Or perhaps something more silent and sad circa Patrick in Offspring. Maybe I have a mood-altering autoimmune or endocrine disease that is going undetected. I imagine hitting the curb and having to call roadside assistance and having a hefty fine to stress about paying off and telling my friends about my car crash. Why am I looking for sinister things to go wrong?
There shouldn’t be caveats to feeling truly, madly, stupidly happy. There shouldn’t be shame in acknowledging feeling good and showing off and luxuriating in the nice kind of goosebumps. Your sensitivity to this lickety-split limerence with life shouldn’t feel like a liability. Things are allowed to be good. When we accept systemic, sustained unhappiness or mistreatment or misjudgement for so long, we become conditioned to believe that the standards we’ve set ourselves are high enough when they are not even close to what we deserve. We’re usually hurtling our bodies over a very low high-jump bar and clearing it pretty fucking easily until we realise we could take it up about five notches and still not quite brush the hairs on our back against that metal pole.
We toil so hard over self care, our routines and rules and rituals. But we rarely rave about our triumphs and shimmy through our successes when these practices pay off. That feels too self-indulgent and too risky. It’s the whole ‘don’t jinx it’ mentality - that thought of just as we let our guard down for a second, something terrible will happen. If we introduce a new serum into our night time regime, we will suffer a ferocious eruption of acne. We ground ourselves and dial-down the wins in life to avoid jeopardising our happiness, but self-sabotage in doing so. It’s everyone’s biggest gripe.
I had thrush last week. I had painful, red, hot thrush after a foolish one night stand with a mediocre, unofficial ex. I convinced myself that the bleeding from this thrush (spotting being a common side effect) was in fact actually a hallmark of first trimester pregnancy symptoms (despite being on the contraceptive pill). Then, I proceeded to take compliments from my newly clear, freckly, glowy skin (a common side effect of Go To’s Face Hero and The Ordinary’s salicylic acid combo and taking one’s makeup off at night and not drinking 50 g&ts every second night and being in the sunshine) as another telltale pregnancy symptom. Hah! Unwanted baby! That was it! That was going to be The Big Fuckery that would ruin this goodness I was feeling. Yes, that would unfold quite dramatically and nicely. Because feeling this felicitous couldn’t be real. Turns out I was also smelling things at a higher olfactory frequency. The beach air, pastries, perfume, the trees. I was revelling in the smells on my walks. My senses were heightened. Turns out acute senses and happy hormones are also clues for cooking a bun in the oven. My case was stacking up quite nicely. Then came the panic. After losing my appetite (because I was eating what I wanted when I wanted, exercising healthily and getting enough sleep), I traced this to myriad medical articles on a loss of appetite at some point during pregnancy, too. I threw down my sushi and quite literally flew up the street to my pharmacy. I asked loudly and blatantly ‘where are the pregnancy tests?’ and proceeded to voice my concerns to the pharmacist. Speed walking home, I pictured the scenes that would unfold should my test be positive. The trauma and the tears and the decisions. I was hot and my hands trembled with the whirring thoughts. I flung the test from its packet and focused desperately hard on urinating. The timer signal flashed on the accidentally high tech test I’d purchased for a hot dollar and then appeared with a book signal alerting me that I had failed the pregnancy test and had an inconclusive result. Fuck. Oh fuck. More panic. This is when I lost it. I just burst into tears. I called my best friend in a ridiculously frenzied state of affairs. I told her I couldn’t be feeling so happy and I was definitely pregnant. She brought three more tests to my house moments later. I furiously sculled another glass of water and wet another stick. ‘Not pregnant’ it told me. I fell to the ground and exhaled, heart beating aggressively. We laughed a lot.
I wasn’t pregnant, and therefore I was just happy. My skin was just looking nice. I was just not overly hungry for bad foods. I had a clear mind. I felt good. I’d read some revelatory books that had changed the way I was talking to myself. The niggling, incessant, fatalistic voice of self-doubt had been muted. The thrush was enough bad luck for the week and was indeed just thrush.
My best friend told me that I was allowed to be happy. So did my mum. And so have a few other confidantes this week since this whole hysterical pregnancy palaver. I don’t know exactly why I’m finding it so difficult to just sit in this ridiculously good mood and place I’m in. I know that I deserve it and I know that I’ve had enough shit go down in recent months to warrant some relief or a hiatus from the hysteria, but it feels eerily nice. I want to bottle up the way I am thinking and living right now for a rainy day, or for someone I love when they are low. I want to document it and describe it in such obnoxious, astute detail that I can relive it whenever I consult a diary page or a sticky note. It feels too rich. Can I deposit it and grow interest on it, please? Isn’t too much pleasure pain?
It feels hard right now to be openly positive and upbeat. There is so much inherently wrong going on around us. Our world is in a disastrous way. Leaders are failing. People are suffering. And it makes it even harder to embrace and revel in small, fleeting moments of joy. But from the cocoon of isolation and solitude, it feels as if the time alone we have had to ourselves has worked wonders for smoothing out the creases and crinkles of life. Things we’ve put off grieving, postponed addressing and shirked responsibility from dealing with have been locked with us in a padded cell and we’ve had to make amends with them. We’ve had time to iron out and process the damage. And while it felt gruelling and excruciating at first, how fucking remedial has it has been in hindsight?
I think it’s been a half-year of a breakdown to a breakthrough for a lot of us. In Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence (a dive into awe and other things that sustain us), she speaks of Kintsugi - the Japanese art of putting broken china back together again with a ritzy lacquer that is then dusted in powdered gold to give the ornament a divine, regal veining. They also call it ‘golden repair’. You can see all the fractures clearly and that’s where the beauty lies, in the breaks.
I am so fiercely proud of what the people in my life are achieving, of the relationships my girlfriends are in with brilliant men, of the love they show, of the mistakes we’ve forgiven each other for, and of the bad things I’ve left behind.
There were shit dates, tragic flings, small heartbreaks that weren’t big enough to be validated as real ones (thus left untreated and raw and grew infected), too many dinners, too little time for people that mattered, too much alcohol, not enough micellar water. There were spin classes after 10 hour days that should’ve been slow walks along the water’s edge, or just a book in bed. Or maybe a plate of carbohydrates and a hug instead of a meaningless hookup and a stolen hoodie. (I no longer have a lost property shelf in my wardrobe and the clearout of men’s borrowed possessions was cathartic). There were so many things that were wrong and they all had to stop in order for me to realise how intrinsically damaging they were. When I struggle to grapple with my newfound giddy feeling of things going ‘right’, I need to remind myself of the context through which this was born. I am allowed to sit in the good because I have had to trudge through the bad bits.
I will savour the happy. I will nurture it, feed it, cheers to it, inhale it, rub it in deep and share it with everyone around me. I will say good morning on my walk to retrieve coffee and I will tell someone to have a good day after they scan my groceries for me. And then, eventually, when this supply of elation runs out (as it probably inevitably will), there will be some left somewhere in the stratosphere and someone else can have it for a while before it comes back to me. Like a baton of happiness that will tether us all together as we take turns and try to make sense of the things in this big, long race of life. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Words — Genevieve Phelan
Image — Emily Green
