What Makes Me Happy?

When the pressure wears off and I am not overwhelmed by the loneliness of the journey - the tasks, traumas, and responsibilities, I think about what makes me happy. Not the things I thought would make me happy because I saw others enjoying them. The things that I would think a normal human being should enjoy because society makes you believe - hey! these are the things you are supposed to enjoy. None of this! Today, I talk to myself from a nuanced space of authenticity that I have managed to achieve over the years. Shedding the layers of my rigid beliefs, toxicity and harrowing self-pitying episodes one day at a time, I take to my senses and ask myself what makes me happy. I wonder what reinstates hope in me during my existential season.

The simple pleasures of life, really. Moments when my elusive friend remembers to check up on me. He asks me if I have eaten or not. He apologises for being unable to meet today when I wander the city alone with heavy bags of clothes, cameras and my past. We text back and forth, as I sit with a bunch of strangers, watching a documentary film on the Santhali community's struggle to save their lands from the government. I am silently wailing as I read his texts. The main character's pain of losing her daughter touched a nerve in me somewhere. She is talking to her marigold flowers, telling these glorious yellow buds that if she stops watering them, she will lose the last thing she holds dear to her life. It was her daughter who used to take care of the flower beds, and now her. The way she talks to the plants and the gigantic trees in local Santhali folk songs and poems reminds me of the loss of losing my mother at a young age. I tell my friend how some words uttered by my father the other day hurt me. I don't talk about family to everyone, not every friend. It takes me time to get vulnerable. I have opened up to him more during this past month. It has become somewhat easier to tell him when it is aching. We talk more once I have reached home. I show him the soft toy I bought for myself from the pop-up - my first in this lifetime, and he sends me morbid cat memes. I love how we bond.

He was there in my dream that night. It was a bizarre thing. Something that we laughed about the next morning. He checks up on me again. Reading the gentle words of love and care in a friendship that took time to blossom makes me happy. The poetic nature of how we communicate and take care of one another makes me happy. What else makes me happy? I ask myself looking at my naked top in the mirror this afternoon. I don't feel like wearing many clothes today, just like many other times. It's freeing to not be caged in the tight elastics of a brasserie. A t-shirt is comforting, yet I let go of it today. I just wish to behold the beauty of my nakedness. Moments later, I head to my bed. I hug the soft toy and my pillow and I am lost in a daze of afternoon hue and many hazy memories. I am asleep. I am top naked in that dream looking at myself in a dressing table mirror, in a different house this time. I am alone in the bedroom and I have now ventured to the drawing room, kind of afraid wondering what if someone sees me like this. I think I experienced sleep paralysis at this moment, after ages. I don't realise the heaviness of it and wake up to look at my phone and sleep off again I haven't had such a comforting sleep in ages. I wake up feeling rested. My mind is not churning thousands of thoughts and scenarios where many things could go wrong. It is at ease hugging the gentle soft toy remembering the words of comfort uttered by the friend last night. This trance of rest after an emotionally heavy month makes me feel happy.

I am writing heartfelt long-form after ages. Drowning deep in the feelings of unworthiness and low self-worth for years, recognising the imposter syndrome lurking around, and being paralysed by the words of criticism for many many years, it feels happy to know that I can get past it. At least today. I am in a state of gentle glee, calm on the outside, dancing-with-joy child on the inside.

I am happy that tonight I will cook the pahadi dal and rice, sourced by my father from my mother's homeland. I soaked it in time, feeling the grains with my hands whenever I make a trip to the kitchen. I see them absorbing water and my love every time I grab a feel, growing sizes slowly and steadily letting the happiness seep in.

A few Happys I could feel today. #Gratitude #Happy #Glee #Happiness