Little Rafts

I don’t think anyone in this life is destined for sadness. I don’t think they were put here to live a life of sorrow or struggle to get out of bed each day. I don’t think happiness is only for a select few, an upper few, a lucky few.

If you would have asked me how I felt about happiness three years ago I would have said, that shit’s for the birds, and then I would have given you a horribly nervous laugh that I hoped you bought. I wouldn’t tell you that I never quit writing about how to make my life bearable. I wouldn’t tell you there was a horrible stockpile of letters to my parents in the lowest most drawer of my dresser from moments I just couldn’t anymore.

I would give you that laugh and I would quit looking you in the eye in hopes that you bought it. In hopes that maybe I bought it too.

It’s not that I didn’t tell people I was sad. I told my mom, I told close friends, ones that weren’t too happy already because how could they relate.

I wrote about how I would start new, how I would quit doing the things I hated and start doing more of the things I cared about. Except, I didn’t really care about anything.

For me, sadness was like spilt water. It gets everything in its path a little wet and we feel like it’s our job to get things dry, I would agree that is indeed our job, but soon that spilt cup of water turns into a spilt pot of water, a faucet that’s been left on, a flooded basement, and eventually, you find yourself struggling to breathe in the Atlantic. You're basically fucked.

It’s that feeling of nothing ever being good but the quitting, the thinking about quitting life, the thinking about quitting the job, the moving, specifically the moving to India.

I don’t know when I stopped being sad, I can surely tell you it was not before my move to India and not really even during. I guess for me happiness was being able to breathe again, it was being lifted from the water I was treading and not having to worry that tomorrow I would drown, that my parents would miss me or I would do something undoable.

Happiness was the air and I was choosing to breathe it. I will never forget how mad I was, how hard I cried that moment my mother said you have to choose happiness. I don’t know if I would recommend saying this to someone who is struggling with the concept of living, but she was right.

I know I have the capacity for extreme sadness, like the really bad kind that makes your bed the only safe place on the face of this earth, but I also have the capacity for big real happiness, and I think everyone else does too.

The rafts that the universe throws you in the shark-infested oceans of sadness are sometimes small ones. They are watching my mom laugh like really truly laugh and then laughing with her, they are finding a frog in my yard, having a really good dream, or writing a story I care about, or just thinking about the people I care about.

Yes, I have discovered there are many things I care about, living being one of them.

I guess you just have to choose them, to get onto the little rafts they are and stay there for as long as you possibly can.