Notes on happiness
On February 24, 2020, I started journaling in a small light gray Moleskine. The first line I wrote was, “This attempt will start with a girl.”
So began five years of intermittent journaling always catalyzed by crushes, woes, and sorrows. But I’m not very good at journaling. I go months or even an entire year without touching my journal. In fact, until I penned a new entry at Yosemite National Park last week, I hadn’t even opened my journal since November 27, 2023.
My November 2023 entries were quite sad, full of misery over a relationship that was making me deeply unhappy, but I was in absolute denial that it was the relationship that was making me feel that way. I ended my last entry by writing, “I know that I will be happy again. I just wonder when that will be.”
A few days later came the final straw and I ended my relationship. Thus began an era of freedom and wild independence. In fact I uprooted my entire life and left a house full of roommates behind to live alone in Silicon Valley and start my new career.
At times I have joked that my one and only relationship traumatized me so much that I had to move to an entirely different geographical region. Goodbye Central Coast, hello Silicon Valley.
But that’s not the entire truth. Really there was nothing for me in the Central Coast anymore. I loved my job there, but the pay was low and unsustainable. There were no upwardly mobile job opportunities there, so I had to look elsewhere, and I landed back in the Bay Area, albeit the southern region that I was barely acquainted with before I moved here.
I have been thinking a lot about happiness and what happiness looks like and what happiness feels like. Last week I went to Yosemite National Park for a week. I was a paid chaperone on a school field trip. This is the kind of opportunity that I would have never had at my previous school districts. Every child on that trip paid over a thousand dollars to attend. Even now I am still shocked by the wealth that exists in this community.
But I am an inherently grateful person that believes in signs from the universe. I think a week in the woods was exactly what I needed to clear my head. I loved seeing Yosemite Falls and Mirror Lake and El Capitan. I had never been to Yosemite before. I’m an avid hiker, but there are so many great trails closer to me that I never dream of going too far.
In fact I never dream of going far from home at all. When I was in high school, the furthest I could dream was Berkeley or Stanford. A comfortable 400 miles from home, but still reasonable enough to go home semi-often.
I enjoyed my time in Yosemite, but was relieved when I saw the San José city limit sign on the 101 when we were heading back home. My concept of home can be nebulous, but I am adaptable. Wherever I dwell, I come to consider home quickly enough. Berkeley was home once. Monterey County, too, was home. Now, Campbell (not technically San José) is home.
When I was 15 I went to a week-long summer camp with my afterschool program. I didn’t want to go, but my little brother did and my parents said that he couldn’t go if I didn’t go. I acquiesced and we went. The camp was hosted by UCLA and all the camp counselors were UCLA students. I think the camp was in the San Bernardino mountains. We weren’t allowed to shower due to a water shortage and I got my period on my second day there. Other schools were present and no one from the same school got placed in the same cabin group. On my first night there, I cried myself to sleep over how homesick I was.
And when I went home a week later, I cried even more because I was so happy to be home.
Home hasn’t always been a happy place for me, but I think I’m destined to always live halfway stuck in my own head. I’ve always lived partly in fantasies of my own making and I’m not sure that will ever change. In one of my 2020 journal entries, I wrote about how happy I was back then. My new psychiatric medication was working and I was reading tons of books again. In fact I wrote that that was all I need — to read tons of books. If I just do that, then I will be totally fine.
“I learned to always be alone and to never be alone” — a line I wrote in 2024, in the concluding poem of my single collection. I don’t feel lonely anymore like I used to when I used to feel like I had to be alone. In fact I know that if I ever don’t want to be alone, there are countless people to whom I can turn.
But there is a unique kind of happiness that comes when one learns to be at peace alone. I think I’ve been working towards this specific happiness for a long time, and I kind of think I’ve finally earned it. Years of half-baked friendships and failed relationships and heartbreaking situationships and casual dating — I think I’m really over all that and entering a new era. An undefined era, but an era where I will be at peace by myself.
