A Thing For Happiness

I could be happy.

I could be so happy.

I really could.

I know this with every fibre of my bloody being.

There is a hole where the happiness should be.

And that happiness is so very close, it awaits me in the next room. Happiness is so tantalisingly close. So bloody achievable, and yet it is locked away and kept from me, in a travesty of fate. I have found happiness, and yet I am no closer to attaining it than were it to be a world away from me.

Having strived and laboured, I have found where happiness resides. I have discovered its location and I know that room so well now, I even know the nature of the key to its door.

I have known all of this for such a very long time.

I live in a purgatory that I suspect is of my own making, but the pull of that happiness, that which is rightfully mine, keeps me here. It keeps me in a state of painful limbo and the more I worry at this conundrum, the more I bleed.

That happiness of mine, dangling on the end of a stick, that isn’t the only thing that keeps me here. I have encamped here, outside this room for so long, I can’t go anywhere else. I know nothing else and the alternatives upset me greatly.

My life is here. I have taken root and I cannot be unearthed.

My wife.

My two sons.

My home.

My job.

Everything I have and everything that I am, is here.

What is a life without happiness? What is a life that falls short by a single room? An impenetrable wall separating a person from that which they deserve?

Instead of attaining my life’s goal I sit here in misery and stare balefully at that which I could have had, or rather at the tomb that contains my missing piece.

Imagine it! Deprived of the very thing that you crave. Understanding its nature and knowing it awaits you in the very next room. You would go mad. The process of that madness is slow, but it is inexorable and it is inevitable.

I suppose that in the stead of happiness, I am unhappy. Unhappy that I lost. That I fell within sight of the finish line, and I am held back from crossing that line. It is immeasurably worse than that though, and it gets worse with each passing day.

It does not help my cause that my parents got it wrong.

To say that parents were wrong, is to state the bleeding obvious. We are all deeply flawed, we muddle on trying to make the best of things and it serves us well to remain focused on what we’ve achieved, and not dwell upon what went wrong.

I know that much.

I know that much and I don’t blame my parents. Not one bit. I should have known better. It is me who is at fault. Who else could I blame?

My parents, like so many parents, wanted me to be happy. 

They instilled within me a pursuit of happiness, and they started in on this from the very get go. It is so deeply embedded, so much so that it is as much a part of me as my right foot, and I cannot bring myself to cut it out. I would lose too much if I were to attempt to perform that dread surgery.

Pursuing happiness is a fool’s errand. Happiness isn’t a destination, it’s in the way you live and the way you are. It is a part of what you do, and even then it flits this way and that and only touches you when it is minded to do so. 

Happiness does its own thing, it’s not infectious. You can be in a room full of happy people and cast adrift in a sea of isolating sorrow. Happiness is never guaranteed, there is nothing you can do to secure happiness. That is to miss the point and in missing the point you are looking in the wrong place, and you can stake your life on it not being there. You can do that much. You can chart a course through life and avoid happiness entirely. That isn’t all that difficult to do, believe me, I know what I am talking about when it comes to the failed attempts at being happy.

Most important of all, no one can make you happy. To think this is the case, is to surrender yourself to madness and a life of absolute misery. If you are not careful, you will drag the subject of your nonsensical and twisted notions down into your self-imposed delusions and you will resent each other to the point of hatred.

In my quest for happiness, I have learnt all of these things and much, much more. I have explored each and every avenue and I have singled it down to one infuriating thing. 

There is only one thing that prevents me from being happy, and that is my thing.

I never found my thing.

My thing is right there, in that locked room before me, and I don’t know what it is. Its form eludes me, let alone its name.

I have searched a lifetime to find the one thing that I was meant to do. The one thing I am good at. I wanted, with all my heart, to have talent. I wanted to shine. 

The worst of it is that I know that it is within me! I know I have something, I just don’t know how to dial into it, and every day that I fail to understand what it is that I must do, every day that I do not fulfil my potential and discover the purpose of this life of mine, every day that I am lost, is a waste. 

I am a waste.

I am a loser.

I am so disappointed in myself.

All the same, I work hard and I strive, but there’s a part of me that is empty and hollow and it cries out for more. It reminds me that I am not doing what I must and in doing the things that I do do, in plodding this well-trod rut, I fail in the most fundamental of ways. 

I fail to be me. 

Every step of the way, in this life of mine, I betray my true self and in so doing I add to a dark burden that grows each and every day and grows so large that it threatens to crush me.

Once, time was on my side.

Once, I had it all at my feet.

A life full of adventure and potential awaited me. 

My parents patted me on the back and reminded me that they wanted me to be happy, that I could beanything, do anything and that I would be so happy!

I can’t though. Not now and I don’t think I ever could, not even back then.

By convincing me that I could be anything and do anything, I thought I could also have anything. That all I could ever desire was at my fingertips, all I had to do was reach out and take it.

It was supposed to be that straightforward and it was laid out as something so easy, a child could do it.

This was a lie. A lie that we all are told and that we then pass on to others. A lie that entices us away from where we should be, and drowns us in a sea of false possibilities.

I had a lifetime to discover this, and only now does the enormity of that lie, and what it means for me, reveal itself. Even then, I turn away and fail to appreciate it in all its woeful glory. You see, I have all these habits and I have a life that I have built and I built this life around others. I cannot extricate myself from a trap of my own making. I just can’t.

Do you want to hear the worst of it?

The reason why the truth of my mistake has been revealed to me?

My children.

My two sons.

I passed that lie on to them and now I know I cannot take it back. I sent them out into the world with a reassuring squeeze of their shoulder and told them to be happy and to go and find their place in the world, most importantly, to find their thing.

What a hypocrite!

I never found my thing and few people ever do. Those few? I doubt they are happy. We all imagine that they are. That they are living the dream, but not just any old dream, they are living our dream. We tell ourselves that they are living our dream just the way we would live it, and if we are honest, we envy them that. We begrudge them their success and everything that it entails. We would tear them from that which we covet in a thrice and we would punish them for ever having what we could not.

After all, we all love the underdog, don’t we?

The question is, would we really want their life if we were offered it? 

Really, would we?

Would we swap lives with our idols and walk in their shoes?

The only way we could, is if we went in blind, but that would end so badly. The rude awakening that would hit us like a steam train of the reality of their life. A reality that is even rougher than our own.

I should let it go, I know I should. But I have worked so hard and I know I deserve more. 

Life should be better than this.

We are all promised a better life and it is a promise that drags us along, come what may.

Besides, I want to prove them all wrong, and I want to prove myself wrong. I want to show my boys that if you work hard and keep going, it all comes good in the end. That there really is a happy ending.

I live for that day.

The day that it all comes right.

Then I will be happy.

Once I find my thing and everything slots into place and I am whole.

Once that happens, I will be happy.

I have to believe this and I have to keep going.

What else is there?