tiny unglamorous folds
tracking my happiness for a year
“...human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness is determined.”
(from How to Pick your Life Partner)
It took me a long time to truly understand this.
For most of my life, I was convinced that I had to live in a sustained, unadulterated state of euphoria and that anything less was a mental failure.
To reach said state of euphoria as efficiently as possible, I started rating my days on a 1-10 happiness scale in 2019.
On the side, I kept a log of what I did that day (Did I drink alcohol? Exercise? Eat healthy?) I wanted to be able to map what I was doing on a given day to how happy/unhappy it was, then cut out items that correlated with sub-5 rank days / double down on ones that correlated with rank 7 ones. Hack my happiness, you know.
Which is always a really great idea.
This led to some pretty drastic lifestyle changes. I started waking up earlier. Started meditating consistently and writing Morning Pages (a longhand brain dump when you wake up), and then went completely sober in September. Doesn’t sound too crazy, but pre-February 2019 I was going on month-long benders with reckless abandon and waking up at like 4:00PM so any type of self-discipline was novel.
These new habits were all good and lovely at first, until the way I did them became self-sabotaging.
I’d journal or meditate explicitly to be happy, not out of self-improvement, and when I wouldn’t see immediate results, I’d stop. Then I’d pull myself together and restart it all when I truly could not live with the disarray a day longer.
Even during the times I was sticking to these new habits, I couldn’t find any real patterns. When I stopped drinking, my peaks and valleys were just as high and low, if not lower than before. And a lot of those highs in the summer were just externally induced boosts from my post-grad adventures. A solo trip to Costa Rica, my first Lightning in a Bottle, a few weeks spent backpacking through Eastern Europe. The steady decline in autumn came from a bumpy adjustment to full-time work. Retraining my discipline and learning how to be responsible (??) after the lawless freedoms of college.
Then, I started craving 10 rank days. I would grow frustrated when I couldn’t breach a 7 average. And slowly, this bid for happiness became instead a success metric that I needed to hit… one that made me miserable.
So then came 2020.
By now I had given up my daily rankings. Covid was in full force, and I had quietly accepted that this year was going to be rough. I didn’t need my rankings to tell me that. I made my peace with the fact that my 10 rank days would be few and far between.
They were were there still, of course. Visiting SK in that house on the Santa Barbara coast. Dozing underneath those big airy windows, resting my face against his chest and watching the patio lights twinkle. Joshua Tree on my birthday. Sprawling on a rock for hours and watching the world throb around me in shimmery chrome. Feeling the strings tethering me to reality grow more and more tenuous until they completely and gloriously snapped off.
So the 10 rank days would come along every several months, without fail — which was nice, but certainly not enough for steady happiness.
But this year, when I began to write consistently, something changed.
I began to pay attention to mundane routines. Everyday occurrences. 10 rank moments.
Hidden in the tiny, unglamorous folds of life: a walk around the neighborhood at dawn. Stopping to watch a cat perched on a fence — eyes half closed, tail lazily twitching. Seeing the wetness of the morning cling to the hood of a car. The way the light glanced off those little droplets. Driving to a lookout after a long day of work to catch the sunset. Windows down, car seat vibrating, and the palm trees flying by above. Finding a seat in the shady cafe down the street. Sitting in the corner with my favorite book and a hot cup of coffee and watching skaters and dogs and families with their tiny babies in their strollers pass by. Impromptu Spikeball at Venice Beach. Running into the ocean as the sand turned pink and the water glowed violet. Floating in those white frothy waves and trying to hold on to the colors before the light was gone.
As it always seemed to happen: when I stopped looking for happiness, I found it.
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Melo ooout