Last night I scraped cat poop out of the sink in my basement laundry room.
This morning I woke up to the sting of a rejection I’m still nursing.
All week I’ve felt scatterbrained and forgetful, making long to-do lists and promptly forgetting them as soon as I kick off my shoes at the door.
But I would say I am happier than ever. Which feels unexpected every time.
“What’s new with you?” my friend Kobey asks.
There’s nothing.
That used to be bad. To have nothing new to report meant I was still slogging through mud and misery without a break in the clouds. But I feel okay. The emotional lows we used to share aren’t the things I have to report now. Lately “new” means bragging that I cleaned my living room and getting second opinions on whether I should start physical therapy for my problem arm. It’s not hiding bad news, I just don’t have any bad things that feel newsworthy.
“Did I tell you my cat pooped in the sink?” I say.
“How are you doing?” my friend Alex asks over chicken nuggets.
I have no answer for her except: “I’m really good!”
I mean it.
I feel like I should have more to say about my happiness, but that’s all there seems to be to say.
Growing up, my dad read us C.S. Lewis every year. There was a line in one of the Chronicles of Narnia about how there are pages and pages to be said about terrible and sad things, but good and happy things are boring and can be summarized in just a few sentences.
By this metric, I am exceptionally happy.
I didn’t always feel this happy. As recently as 2 years ago I was filling my notes app with attempts to fend off anxiety spirals and generally documenting that I felt like absolute shit about myself and life in general.
There are lots of reasons my outlook on life has changed. I like my current home — and it feels like one. I have a cat and a roommate who both like me 75% of the time (the other 25% are partly my fault and partly due to factors entirely beyond my control). I have the opportunity and ability to fill my life with experiences I enjoy — hiking and cooking and art and stories. I got on medication for anxiety and lowered the bar of existential dread from my eyebrows to somewhere closer to chest height.
But I also think a big part of the reason I feel happy lately, even while scraping soggy cat poop out of an old sink, is because I like myself better than I have before.
Like, sure, I could probably work on myself but actually I’m pretty dang chuffed with the current model and could stop here and call it as good as it gets.
This is not the life I thought I would be living.
My friends talk about making their inner child happy and safe. They reflect on how little them would be proud of who they are today.
I have always been sure that if there were two of me, we would not like each other. And every year and big life decision that goes by, I become more sure that little Lydia would not have been pleased to know I was how her life was going to go.
I don’t think she’d hate me. She’d certainly feel we dropped the ball on this whole author gig that was going to be our main goal in life. I think she’d be relieved I’d found a way to be successfully single and romantically unentangled without getting constant flack for it. I don’t think she’d be able to pick me out in a crowd — I’ve chopped my hair off, discovered I love wearing red, I have a cat who I let sleep with his asshole inches from my face and I talk to total strangers without breaking into a cold sweat.
I don’t think she’d be mad, but I think she’d be disappointed.
I think I’m okay with that. If we were all what our younger selves wanted, we would all be astronauts, presidents, and in some rare cases, chicken farmers.
Me, I’m happy. Strangely, I never factored that into my hopes and dreams when I was young.