Everything is great.
You got the classes you wanted for the semester; you love your friends so much it almost hurts; you go on hikes on Saturday mornings and sit in rain-darkened, amber-lit cafés doing your homework on Sunday evenings; you wake up and you go to sleep and the world keeps turning and it is a good world, isn’t it, it’s a good one. Maybe the very best.
So, what’s the problem? Why is there this deep, yawning chasm in your chest, like this empty, bleak winter that goes on forever, like nothing you do will ever be enough to warm it? Why, if everything is great, do you feel as if the universe is collapsing beneath your feet?
I think that sometimes we have a tendency to equate good things happening with guaranteed happiness. You got the job you wanted, and now you’re going to be jumping for joy the rest of your life, or at least the rest of the week. You got the classes you wanted for the semester; you love your friends so much it almost hurts; you go on hikes on Saturday mornings and—
And, and, and. And that’s the whole of your life, isn’t it? These good things, piling up on top of one another, stacked so high you can’t see around them, and if you for one second try to pretend they don’t exist they’re going to fall apart and you’ll be left with nothing. Don’t complain when you’ve got so much to appreciate, right? Don’t be sad when you’ve got so much to love.
It’s taken me a long time to disengage the concept of “happiness” from the concept of “good things happening”. Good things, really good things, the sort of good things that get plastered to billboards and shouted about from the rooftops, come around once in a blue moon. It’s not fair to force yourself to be eternally happy because you aced one test, because you won one race, because you made out with one crush. The next day might be absolutely horrible, the worst day you’ve ever had, and you deserve to embrace that terrible awfulness without burdening yourself with guilt for not being ‘appreciative’ enough of what you have.
Good things come, and good things go. It isn’t healthy to measure your own happiness by them; I’ve tried, and I’ve failed. I’ve come to learn that what works for me, when that deep, yawning chasm seems too wide and too cold to ever cross, is to shrink back to myself. I stop thinking about the big picture stuff. I stop thinking about the internship I applied for and got; I stop thinking about the amazing classes I got for the semester; I stop thinking about how many friends I have; I stop thinking about whether this world is a good one or not, because sometimes it isn’t, and that’s okay.
Instead, I think about myself. I look at my hands. They’re not very special, in the grand scheme of things — but we’re not talking about the grand scheme of things, we’re talking about this, here, right in front of you, the “little life” we’ve all forgotten.
My hands have allowed me to write stories and poems and this article. And I’m typing this article on my computer, which has been with me through the entirety of college, to every class and lecture and club meeting, and the tabs in my Chrome window are a light purple, my favorite color. And to the right of my computer is my water bottle, plastered with stickers from all the places I’ve been, and to the left of my computer is a bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups that my friends got for me while I was out of state for the weekend. I’ve got a stack of books I can’t wait to read, and fancy pens that my sister gifted to me on my birthday, and jewelry that I wear when I want to feel dressed up. They’re all mundanities, hardly more than blips on anybody else’s radar, so small that even I sometimes forget about them.
But they are important. They remind me that I’ve built a life that means something to me, one that isn’t dictated by the ebbs and flows of greatness and success. They remind me that if it’s too hard to love the entirety of this world, then I can love it in bits and pieces.
Try it. Make a list of the little things, not the good things. The pair of shoes you like best. The cactus-shaped refrigerator magnets you got from Target. The snow falling soft and sparkling beyond your bedroom windows. The pale, gold light of the sun in the early spring. The sound of your mom’s laugh when you crack a joke. This is what matters. This is what gets us through.
Listen, it’s all right. There are days when getting out of bed is the most difficult thing in the world, even if you know you’re meeting friends in the afternoon, or graduating in the morning, or traveling to Amsterdam that night. You’re allowed to be sad. You’re allowed to not care about any of it. You’re allowed to lie there a while, breathing in and breathing out, not up to the task of embracing the whole world with open arms. Just take a minute, an hour, however long you need. At the end of it, your hands will still be yours, and the water bottle will still have all its stickers, and you will still be you.
Not everything is great, but it’s going to be okay.