The Struggle of Happiness

Ethan sat at the edge of his bed, staring at the cracks running along the ceiling. The silence of the night pressed against his chest, dense and stifling. For weeks, he had avoided this confrontation with himself, filling the void with work, drinks, and fleeting laughter that left no echo. But tonight, there was no distraction—only the gnawing weight of his own mind.

The shadows in the corners of the room seemed alive, whispering secrets he had tried to bury since childhood. His parents’ voices resurfaced: his father shouting before slamming the door, his mother sobbing quietly in the kitchen. He was eight when their marriage fractured into shards. That was his first lesson—that love, even the purest kind, could fall apart without warning.

But separation was only the first wound. Neglect soon followed. His mother, consumed by her grief, had no energy left to notice Ethan’s hunger for attention. His drawings left on the fridge, his trembling hands when nightmares woke him—His father, remarried within a year, spoke to him with the politeness reserved for strangers. And then came abandonment. Ethan was twelve when he realized no one was coming to his school plays anymore. Rows of parents clapped for their children, while Ethan walked offstage, clapping for himself.

These memories were the demons he carried—demons he dressed up with ambition and charisma. His ego became his armor. If he was charming enough, if he was strong enough, maybe no one would see the boy who had been left behind.

Tonight, however, the armor cracked.

Ethan closed his eyes, trying to steady his breathing, but the images came faster—his father’s retreating back, his mother’s vacant stare, the empty auditorium seat. Rage bubbled beneath his skin. He wanted to destroy these shadows, to crush them under the weight of denial. But fighting only made them stronger. His ego screamed: You are not weak. You are not broken.

Yet another voice whispered: What if you are?

It was then that Maya’s face appeared in his mind.

Maya—the one person who had seen through his performance, who offered not pity but presence. She carried herself with a quiet strength that came from knowing who she was and where she came from. A descendant of the Mam, one of the Mayan peoples, she spoke often of her grandparents and the stories they passed down. Her voice would soften when she described the mountains of Guatemala where her ancestors once built homes, her words painting a landscape Ethan had never seen but felt in her telling.

She had a dream, one she spoke of with fire in her eyes: to become an archaeologist, to uncover the stones and pottery of her people, and to build a museum in her hometown. “Not just a building with glass cases,” she told Ethan once, her hand brushing his as they walked along the pier. “A place where children can see who they are. Where the world can learn that we are more than footnotes in history books. We are alive. We are still here.”

Ethan admired her passion but sometimes felt suffocated by it. Her clarity was a mirror he could not bear. While she embraced her roots, Ethan had spent his whole life running from his. She looked backward and saw strength; he looked backward and saw emptiness.

Now, in the stillness of his room, her absence stung more than the shadows of his parents. She had begged him to confront his past, to let her in. But he had pushed her away, afraid she would see him for what he was: still the abandoned boy, still the neglected child, still broken.

When Maya left, she had not done so in anger but in sorrow. “Ethan,” she said, her eyes wet but steady, “I cannot build a museum to honor my people and love a man who cannot honor his own story. If you don’t face it, it will always own you.”

Her words haunted him now. She wasn’t devastated because he hadn’t changed fast enough—she was devastated because he refused to change at all.

Tears blurred Ethan’s vision. He realized that all these years he had fought his demons with arrogance, believing he could bury them under success, under relationships, under bravado. But the child inside him—the boy left in the school auditorium—never disappeared. He had been waiting to be acknowledged, not silenced.

He thought of Maya again, kneeling in the dirt during one of her research trips, brushing away centuries of soil to reveal a shard of pottery. Her eyes would light up as though she had uncovered a piece of her own soul. Ethan remembered the way she explained to him that archaeology wasn’t about treasure hunting—it was about listening to the past, letting it speak through fragments.

And suddenly, he understood: she wanted him to do the same with his own life. To stop smashing his fragments to dust and instead pick them up, study them, honor them.

Ethan stood, pacing the room. His chest ached as though his body resisted what his soul already knew. If he wanted peace, he could no longer fight the darkness. He had to embrace it—to accept that his parents’ separation had taught him fragility, that neglect had carved in him a hunger for attention, and that abandonment had left a scar that would always ache. These traumas were not weaknesses to erase; they were truths to carry.

He whispered to himself, voice trembling: “I see you. I see the boy I was. And I won’t abandon you anymore.”

The room seemed to exhale with him. For the first time in years, the shadows felt less like enemies and more like companions—reminders of where he had been, not where he had to stay.

Maya’s absence still hurts. He longed for her laughter, her touch, her stories about the Mam language she was relearning, the museum blueprints she sketched in her notebook late at night. She would point to a page and say, “Here, this will be the children’s corner—so they can draw their own family stories, even if the world tries to silence them.”

She had given him glimpses of a life rooted in truth and heritage, a life where the past wasn’t something to escape but something to honor.

He knew now that even if she never returned, she had given him a gift: the courage to stop running. Healing was not about proving he was untouched by pain but about showing he could live fully with the pain.

He sat back on the bed, exhausted but lighter. His ego had lost tonight, and in its defeat, Ethan found something closer to truth. He wasn’t healed—not yet, maybe not ever completely. But he was no longer running.

The boy in the auditorium had finally found someone clapping for him—Ethan himself.

And in that fragile applause, he could almost hear Maya’s voice, steady and warm: “Every shard is part of the whole. Don’t throw them away.”

The struggle of happiness had only just begun.