Happiness is a Circle

Recommended listening: “Echolalia” — Yves Tumor.

I’m becoming me over and over again.

I came back from college and met up with friends—some I’ve known since forever and others with whom I reconnected with this past winter break over a visit to a mutual friend’s college. We unironically became close friends even though we barely talked throughout high school. It’s funny how friendships blossom seemingly out of nowhere. We’ve been having meaningful conversations lately, something that I noticed I’ve been craving. I lacked the same interconnectedness I have with people I’ve grown up with compared to the new friends I’ve recently made in college. However, after becoming closer with a few people in particular and I realized I have things in common with people everywhere, we just have to be lucky enough to meet each other at the perfect time.

Highway 1, Northern California

“You seem really happy,” he told me.

“I truly think I’m the most genuinely happy I’ve been since I was a kid,” I told him. “Second semester taught me a lot and I’m content with the track I’m on with relationships I’ve created. I’m just excited for life.” There’s so much more that I want to say here but I have about 35 pages worth of journal entries already written about this very feeling and I honestly don’t feel like consolidating all of that in here.

“I don’t know what it was, but you seemed to be holding something very heavy throughout senior year and you seem very light now.” He and I weren’t exactly close friends in high school, but we did have mutual friends and hung out together from time to time. It’s interesting that he noticed.

“Yeah, I think I honestly just stopped carrying other people’s weight and thinking it was my duty to help them through things by putting their shit onto myself.”

“That’s really good. I’m proud of you.”

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Summer in New England

You go for another walk. This time you turn right instead of left. You lead yourself to a crooked staircase that points you down a tunnel of trees and towards the sun. Today’s been the hottest day of them all. You convince yourself you have a fever because you forgot what summer heat feels like after all this rain. You come across the perfect set of mailboxes parked in front of a blue wall. A college set of best friends. You always take notes of all the ones you like. Two teenagers glare at you as your feet crackle in the wood chips and they spill what stories they have good enough to tell to each other so far on the merry-go-round. You take too long to find the right place to sit. You always do. Finally, next to the singular flower in the field. You watch it sway in the wind and hope your legs don’t get itchy. A monarch circles the tree in front of you and a bluebird sweeps through the air to draw your attention, showing off its speed before departing to leave room for the train that rattles between the patterned roofs, and you think back to your early days here, riding into the town for the first time. It all floods in at once and you remember the tall green grasses at the top of the hill, and losing your voice screaming at paddocks at the top of your lungs, picking pollen out of your corduroy’s, and deciding you want a rose garden when you grow up. You remember “in small towns, what goes around comes back around” and how you got to witness “only thirty minutes from Alewife.” Your heart grew soft for a balcony view, and you watched your team lose out on an all-nighter.

Some days I’d pause on a walk and just stare at how picturesque the overgrown sidewalk looked, and question why that mattered to me at all. I miss a lot of the street corners now, and the familiarity I began to have at certain intersections, knowing where I was on that side of the world. I’ve come so far. At the beginning of the year, just having my eyes open was too overwhelming. Every single thing about it was different, the license plates, the signage, the terminology, the streetlights, the concrete itself, the trees, the roofing of the buildings, the powerlines. It all gave me a headache at first, but now I have found comfortability. I no longer fear the foreignness of it all and began to want to remember every single detail.

I would get all excited about the most random things it was throwing everybody off. For example, we would be on a road trip up north for hours in the car and periodically throughout the drive I would just scream from the backseat pointing out the window. And the whole car would be flustered, thinking I had spotted something crazy out on the side of the road like a moose. And to their let down, all I was yelling about were the rolling green grass hills, polka-dotted with flowers. I’d never seen something so pretty. It just looked so perfect to me. It's interesting, going to new places and being surprised at the things you fall in love with that are so average to someone else who calls that place home.

It gets better, I think. Maybe just for a day. Maybe just for a song. But there’s something there to hold onto.

I cannot really articulate a particular source of inspiration. It is really a collective influence from the way I perceive and process everything in my life from photographs, movies, music I listen to, my best friends, my family. Inspiration is a funky thing and the guilt of not creating can often falsely push me to create work without inspiration. I am growing evermore introspective and it sometimes can be a roadblock for me, so caught up in my own thoughts. Just now I am learning to let my guard down a little and navigate my mind’s labyrinth with another human. It feels really good to purge myself of feelings I have been suppressing for so long. That release is cleansing and has me more inspired now than ever.

I'm not sure what to say. Yesterday I didn’t speak to anyone out loud. It was one of the longest days I've had in so long. Multiple plans fell through and it was one of those where you are just dying for it to be nighttime so that you can start over the next morning. I'm not sure why the idea of morning gives you the illusion of a new chance.

I've been fascinated by the idea of strangers watching the sunset together for years. I like to think about how many times I've possibly watched the sun go down with a repeated stranger next to me and never known. The obsession humans have with the sunset, although as far as we have ever existed, it will do it again tomorrow. and tomorrow’s tomorrow, too. but without fail, everyone stops what they are doing at the beach and faces west to countdown the last glimpses of light together. So many outings are planned around sundown — picnics, walks, drives, the right album to play, the right person to be with. I've traveled great distances and to specific locations and lookouts to get a different perspective on the same thing.

Maybe it’s the predictability of the sunset that provides comfort, but ironically the uniqueness that draws me in. often I think it’ll be a drab one, only for it to surprise me with a pink blanketed ceiling that fades into the blue. That might be my favorite color of all time, that solemn blue before night. maybe it’s because sunset is one of the few certainties of everyday. I can count on it. it’s reliable. I can look forward to it and not be let down. i wonder how many of you i may have unknowingly paused to watch the sunset with in my life. if any, at all. there is surely several strangers i frequent often at my favorite spots for the sunset that i’ll never meet. and we will never know what the other is visiting that hour with, but we gather all for the same reason. we watch it go and then we split. i like the fact that it’s us who are actually turning away from the sun, not the sun running from us, dipping under the horizon until tomorrow’s rise. although, now that i think about it, the thought of sunrise never crosses my mind when i’m absorbed with its setting. and that lack of thought about tomorrow maybe is part of its whole appeal.

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I wrote this in my notes app on May 27th as I was going to bed: “What I need to work on: Not seeing people for more than what they are and what they show me. Stop trying to make up idealized versions of people in my head. Have patience and get to know them as they reveal to me their true selves. It may never happen and that’s okay. I know them enough to where they want me to know about them.”

I used to depend on other people for my own happiness, which is treading dangerous waters.

My friend Uma from college visited me in my hometown a few weeks ago. I took her to Santa Cruz with two of my friends, Ryan and Tata. On the drive there, Uma and I told them about our friends in college and then we got into talking about personalities. Uma said she always saw my aura as bright and yellow and that everyone likes me when they first meet me. Ryan chimed in and said there is nothing anyone could dislike me upon first meeting me. I remember her telling me back in March that I was “sunshine in a person.” I still find that hard to believe sometimes but I know that’s because I’m in my head too much.

I read this quote by Tim Kreider that I think encapsulates this feeling quite well: “We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.”

I’ve found that I don’t judge myself as much as I did in the past. Every time I catch myself having these thoughts again, I bring my attention back towards letting those feelings go.

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Friendship

You give a brief embrace as they get onto the train, and you walk home in the rain letting your pants drag under your shoes, dampening the blow of saying goodbye. You make a few bad jokes that never get heard amongst the traffic, and watch the brake lights simmer out. The city reflects off the pavement like the moon on the river upstate. And as it sets, the sun rises, and its hollow image slowly disappears amongst the horizon as you grasp endlessly trying to hold on to the feeling of yesterday’s effortless bliss. When you finally make it to your room, you rip off your wet socks and shoes and crumple into the pillow on the couch fully clothed. You smile because you know you’ll never forget this. You see the art supplies peeking out from the corner of the room that you had bought to paint together, but never got the chance to open. You close the blinds and turn off the lights. you curl into yourself and wipe your eyes. That might’ve been the best Sunday of your life. I'll see you when I do.

I’m noticing how all of the inner work is reflecting outwards. My conversations with loved ones are much calmer and more collected. My patience is expanding. I don’t add a layer of shame whenever I make mistakes or feel a lot of heavy emotions. My thoughts are becoming kinder. I’m growing a real life-long love for the human I see in the mirror every morning. My confidence within myself is growing in such a beautifully slow, subtle and quiet way that people are beginning to forget I used to be an anxious mess everyday. The world feels safer to me. I can let people go and I can release control. Of course, it still hurts my heart, but I can deal with it in a much healthier way. It’s really wonderful to look back on.

You can simultaneously feel like you’re not enough and too much and that’s why it’s imperative to surround yourself with people that make you feel safe to be who you are.

I think many people struggle with identity because they attach themselves so much to a limitation like their career, their studies, their role in the family, their skills or beliefs, and then when they cannot be that thing anymore, it feels like their whole identity has been stripped away, to when they decide they want to change that area of their lives, they feel too ashamed to admit it to others because it’s what they believe they’re valued for and I truly believe that once you detach yourself from all the societal and career labels and begin to identify yourself instead by the core of who you are and your values in life, whilst simultaneously keeping an open mind so you can learn, grow, and evolve every day, that’s when you feel more like yourself, that childlike curiosity of self is what will set you free.

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When I got lost in the mountains, the sky was so big.

I’ve been constantly writing. For 6 hours a day, at least. Part of it is for my job or schoolwork. But most of it is for myself. I’ve fallen in love with it all over again, after almost 10 months of quitting it because of worrying what other people think of me. I’m not sure if I use my writing as a coping skill where it’s me venting to myself and comforting myself through some semblance of rationalization because whatever I do, I can’t seem to express myself physically to other people because I always feel like either they can’t understand me in the way I understand myself or I don’t want to burden them with what I have to say. I’ve always been able to express feelings of happiness so well with others. Sometimes I feel like I get too excited about things. When it’s dusk, I would point outside the window and say “the sky looks so pretty” and fantasize about it for the next ten minutes until the dark blue becomes black, just as quick as it comes.

Sometimes I feel like some people don’t deserve it. To hear what I have to say, I mean. Sometimes I wonder if that makes me a bad person.

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I scribbled out as much as I could out on paper. Even if it didn’t make any sense. Even if it was messy. I wrote about my fears. I wrote about gratitude. I noted problems. I wrote about people and things I loved. I went on a run in the woods as much as I could, especially when I didn’t want to. I would reach a particular point at the top of the hill and stop every time. Sometimes in silence, sometimes with meditation, sometimes with music. You’ll be surprised what thoughts come up and the endorphins you can create for yourself. I got out of my space and stuck to places which weren’t overstimulating. Parks and quiet cafes always help. I genuinely tried to feel my emotions. We often numb and repress but I tried to practice observing and sitting still without judgement. I cried a bit. It felt very uncomfortable. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb and resisted the temptation to scroll. I started to read more again. I tried to tune out my inner critic and accept that not all of my thoughts are true.

I keep trying to memorize every detail of the moments I live in. In the soreness of my legs from standing so long at a concert, the chill of the night. I keep trying to memorize the feelings, the quiet contentment, the laughter, the excitement. I keep trying to memorize the people, their smiles, the way they speak, what makes them laugh. I’m constantly on the cusp of the next part of my life and that’s just so…strange. But it makes it so much easier to find happiness no matter what’s happening to me, in a way? Because I’m already kind of looking at life with those rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, simply because I know these are times I’ll never be able to live again, and these are people I might not always have, and that makes it so much easier to appreciate everything I might miss later.