I Really Was Happy Once

I often doubt my feelings about this. I tell myself nostalgia must be distorting my memories. That no one’s ever really happy, right? But then I look at the photos of me back then. And me afterwards. And you can see the difference in my face. You can see the fear creeping into my smile. The doubt. The desperation. All is no longer well.

When I say happy, I don’t mean permanently blissful. I still got upset, and hurt, and bored. I still wanted things that I couldn’t have. I still cried when I cut myself, and got scared by the monsters under the bed.

What I mean is that I still had the capacity to be happy. To be ‘myself’, from moment to moment. To experience the world, without a constant filter of anxiety. To be, without fear. To feel, without holding back. To act, without calculation. To truly enjoy life.

It’s not until you lose it that you recognize it. It’s the water in which you swim. The way things are. But for me , it started to fade away around the time I turned nine.

Those first 9 years of my life were all that I could have asked for. It was almost ridiculously ideal. The kind of life anyone would want for their kids. It wasn’t perfect, but it was real. I had a stable, loving family. We weren’t rich, but we always had enough. We couldn’t afford fancy holidays abroad, so we went camping. We couldn’t always afford the latest stuff and gadgets, so we made things ourselves.We lived in a beautiful part of the country. I went to a good school, with plenty of friends to play with. I grew up in this sheltered little bubble of happiness. It was all too easy. Nothing ever went really wrong. I never had to worry about anything I did, or struggle, because nothing really mattered. I could be completely ordinary and mediocre, and my family loved me. Everything was safe, and dependable.

Then, we moved. And suddenly, it mattered what people thought of me. It mattered that my jokes weren’t that funny. That I’d never been in a fight. That I wasn’t streetwise, or tough. That I was naive and sheltered. That I was kind of quirky and irritating. People didn’t like me. And now it mattered, because I wasn’t in my safe haven, with the social support I’d always taken for granted. Now the world around me became potentially hostile, and threatening.

And I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t understand why people didn’t seem to like me, and I didn’t have the experience of the world that they all did. It was a different reality. I became incredibly self-conscious. The only solution I could think of was to try to avoid saying or doing anything stupid. Avoid anything that might provoke negative attention. Pretend to be as cool and worldly as everyone else seemed. Pretend to be tough. And keep silent.

I’d always been relatively quiet, but I had been cheeky, a jokester, prone to occasional jubilant outbursts. But now I started to monitor everything I said, and inhibit anything that might catch people’s attention. That might provoke mockery, or isolation. I couldn’t risk it anymore. I couldn’t risk being a person. I had to be a character. I had to be cool. Every interaction had to be controlled.

Of course, the problem with that is that people can tell it’s bullshit. So rather than mocking you for saying dumb shit, they mock you for being too quiet, or being boring, or just being fake. They can tell when you’re not interacting with them in a genuine way, and they reject it.

So I became more and more isolated, and ever more desperate to emulate those who seemed to be popular, and to protect myself from mockery.

And over the years, I lost myself. I lost the ability to react in the moment, to be ‘myself’. Everything became contrived. Everything was an act. There was no real me left. I couldn’t ever enjoy the moment, because I always had to be internally monitoring every situation, trying to avoid slipping up and looking stupid. And so I lost all real meaning in life, and became depressed. And in that depression I would do whatever it took to forget what I’d lost.

You can’t go back. I’m not that person anymore. I killed my personality. I’m what’s left behind after that. But I would give anything to have that time over again. To somehow change how things worked out. To change how I reacted to those challenges. To preserve that capacity to enjoy life.

You can only move forward. But I can’t stop clinging to that past. Because so much since then has gone so horribly wrong. In ways I don’t think I can fix. I want to remember that happiness was real. That it wasn’t always like this. But it hurts so much to do so. So much loss and regret. I’m trapped in thoughts of what could have been. Because reality is just too grim.