Happiness is as Happiness Does

I feel like I start every blog with "so I was struggling..."

I mean, really, how much can one person possibly struggle before realizing just how much they're responsible for the struggle?  The answer to that is another post but suffice it to say, I've been in enough of a quandry about my own happiness that it's starting to seep out of my pores.  I've been made become aware that I look and act like I'm miserable.

That's just great.

It doesn't at all bother me to hear this news.  I'm not happy about it (do you see the conundrum?) but I'm glad that friends alert me to this. At least, they alert me to the fact they can see it...and I do believe its because they care.  But I'm never sure what it actually means.

Well, I wasn't until yesterday.

I got my hair done yesterday and I wanted to take a picture that would basically re-create my current facebook profile picture that's about 3 years old.  The process was an unexpected moment of enlightenment for me.  I took the first picture, recreating the pose as much as I could, and immediately saw it.

I did look miserable.

I was smiling the best I knew how.  I was doing everything I thought I did in the last picture.  I couldn't escape the fact that my eyes just look sad, my smile forced, my shoulders ever so slightly slumped.  As I took the picture, I felt "normal" for me these days.  And that was the reflection of normal--miserable and tired.  I took about 20 versions of that picture before I had to have a talk with myself that started something like, "Katie, you have to try to at least look happy."

Eventually, I did get a picture that doesn't look miserable.  Now, it doesn't look ecstatic.  But the smile looks genuine, the eyes are lit up at least a little.  But there is a definite change; it's not the same face of 3+ years ago.  I think this face has seen a lot in that time.  It's worried a lot, felt a lot of anxiety about a lot of things.  Those changes might be permanent.

It was a striking exercise for me.  I now know exactly what people mean when they say I look miserable.  But I think the lesson for me was in the process: I can get there, I can find something that makes me reflect happy, if I try.  And it might take me a long time, but I'll find it.  It's not negotiable, though, that I have to try.

I think it's so weird and unexpected for me that happiness is something practiced and sought after.  Especially now, our culture here tells us it's everywhere around us and all we need do is become aware of it.  That's true to a degree.  But that which keeps me up at night isn't not seeing flowers or getting hugs.  I'm worried about how to support myself.  I'm worried that my best years are behind me.  I'm worried that I've made irreparable mistakes in my life, that I haven't seized the moment enough.  I'm worried that I'm not a good person, that my intellectual pursuits have taken me far afield of where I should could be.

I'm sure to those older and wiser this seems like such a superficial set of worries.  Inevitably there will be some discussion of the soul and it'll surely be yearning for something.  But those are the waters I'm trying desperately to sail without capsizing...in my little dinghy...with what feels like one functional oar.

So I wonder now if I can actually make my way back to my own "youth" of 3+ years ago.  To that face that look so thrilled to get it's picture taken.  I do think I can.

Maybe I more hope that I can.
That's a start.