I found myself happy this morning and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I felt, happy and I am happy this morning. It seems foreign, it seems like an old familiar face you see in the grocery shop and you spend the next five minutes strategically circling them and asking yourself “Where do I know you from?” without ever approaching them and asking. That’s what happiness feels like this morning. Yes, I have been happy. And I was happy not so long ago but today it felt like a new kind of happy. A calm kind of happy, a happy that I can only describe as joy and I am being honest it terrified me.

Usually what happens when I am happy is that I start to ask myself when I will be sad. But today I am happy and I am not going to dissect it. I am going to sit in comfortably my joy just like I have comfortable been sitting in my sadness for so long. I am going to sit and welcome joy on the seat next to me just like I did with my grief when I lost my grandmother, just like I did with my disappointment when I failed my final board exam last year and just like I am always so openly ready to do with the darkness that’s always tugging at my me.

I think it’s quite strange how as people we have become so hesitant when we are met with joy. When we are met with that tiny feeling reminding us that maybe it isn’t all bad and maybe the sun will shine again and it will do so gloriously.

I say we but maybe this is just me. Maybe this is a reminder for me. Maybe this is me telling me that I should wear joy when it comes as eagerly as I am willing to wear everything else. Maybe this is me reflecting on yesterday’s session with my therapist wherein I didn’t know how to articulate that I am breathing. I am breathing easy. I am noting a slowed down pace in my lungs and in my mind and I am liking it. I didn’t know how to express that. I am very good at expressing everything else. And maybe part of the journey is learning how to express happiness as well, because when it comes, I’d like to recognise it at first glance when it enters through the door again.