On Letting Happiness Be

January, Ongoing

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

The year has just started, and already I am tired in a way that feels out of season. I have been struggling to focus. I sit in classes I am usually excited by and notice how often my attention wanders. I listen, I take notes, but something slips. It feels less like a distraction and more like a weight. I have returned to therapy. That decision arrived with the burden of possibility, possibility in resolution, but I am also old enough to understand what process means and how to trust it.

Earlier this week, while I was dealing with a situation of my own, my mother shared the news of the passing of an old family friend. The news, as she shared it, bore with it the weight of resignation. The woman who died was her friend, had been her friend for several decades. Had accompanied her from spinsterhood through marriage, and the birth of her four children and grandchildren. I don’t recall ever liking this woman necessarily, because she had a habit of comparing my siblings with her own children. Comparison that always grated my nerves and made me uncomfortable with the attention it brought my way since her kids were notably high-flying overachievers.

But one time, around the time I was about to leave Nigeria, I encountered her at a pharmacy in Omida, Abeokuta. It had been long since I last saw her, since I had moved on from home to live on my own, and so the fog of recognition took its time before it faded. There was an incident with the cashier that flustered her as she was about to pay for her medicine. She had forgotten her purse at home, so she stood in front of the cashier resigned to the inevitable trip she had to make home and return to the store again. I was on the line too, having come there to get meds for my now late dad. I stepped in and made the payment on her behalf. It took me several moments of explaining who I was, before she allowed me to do this. I write this now for no other reason but to highlight the dissonance of time. Once upon a time, I felt too seen by this woman, and then later, it seemed as though I didn’t exist at all in her world.

As I dropped the phone that morning, while driving home from the gym, a rare first snow of the year plunging down from the St Louis sky, I found myself thinking about my mother more than about the person who died. About how she is carrying the news. About what it means to mourn a friend who is ever present. I think about how she might move through the house I grew up in, with all the memories of those who once moved through it—my father, that woman, Ben— and are no more. Or the fact of how almost all of her children are now so far away.

Like some of my siblings, I am not home. I cannot sit beside her. I cannot do anything that feels like comfort. All I have to offer, are words that sound too empty for it to mean anything useful. Memory too, has not been useful. I can summon images, moments, fragments of conversation, but they arrive without force, without any conviction. They do not soften anything. They do not feel like relief. They feel like proof that remembering is not the same as being present. I am learning that memory is not a substitute for proximity. In moments like this, I find myself leaning forward into what has not yet happened. Into what I hope will eventually make sense. There is a strange reliance that forms around the future when the present feels insufficient. I tell myself that this is temporary. That later will be easier. That clarity will come. But living this way carries its own quiet cost. It means existing in anticipation rather than arrival.

I am tired of having to refine my understanding of happiness through loss. There is something exhausting about learning joy only after it has been withheld. About needing heartbreak to sharpen your sense of what matters. I wish happiness did not have to be disciplined this way. I wish it could be immediate, undiluted, and allowed to exist without first passing through disappointment.

None of this has stopped me from functioning in the most basic way though. I am going through my own heartbreaks, my own griefs, but I still show up. I still write. I am preparing for the things I am meant to do this week. But effort feels heavier than usual, and enthusiasm, when it appears, feels fragile. I am writing this to stay close to what is happening, not to resolve it. I have lived away from home long enough that absence has begun to feel ordinary. There are whole stretches of life I experience through updates, messages, calls taken at odd hours. I know how to listen carefully to voices traveling through bad connections. I know how to read pauses. I know how to pretend that being informed is the same as being involved. When grief arrives under these conditions, it does not erupt. It thins. It spreads itself across time. There is no single moment to mark it. Instead, it returns in small, persistent ways. In the middle of the day. In the middle of a task. It asks nothing of me except that I notice it and continue.

I think often about how much of my life has been lived in preparation. For later. For stability. For the version of myself that will have earned ease. Aspiration has been my most reliable structure. It has kept me moving when clarity was scarce. It has given shape to days that might otherwise have collapsed into drift. But aspiration also demands patience in ways that are not always kind. To live toward something is to accept a prolonged distance from it. It means tolerating a present that feels provisional. It means telling yourself, repeatedly, that what you want will come later, once the conditions are right. Over time, this habit begins to feel like a moral stance. Endure now. Arrive later. I have been wondering what this posture costs.

I do not want to live only in anticipation. I want happiness to be allowed to exist without becoming evidence of anything. Without having to prove that it was earned or that it will last. I want it to arrive without being diluted by fear or framed as rehearsal. This desire feels simple when I write it down. In practice, it is difficult. Aspiration has shaped my sense of self for so long that releasing its grip feels like risk. Who am I if I am not moving toward something? What anchors me if I allow myself to arrive, even briefly? I do not have answers to these questions. I am not trying to resolve them here. I am only noticing how they accompany me, how they surface alongside grief, alongside distance, alongside the quiet fatigue of this early year. For now, I am practicing a different kind of attention. Letting moments register without immediately assigning them a future. Letting happiness, when it appears, remain unexamined. Letting grief exist without demanding that it instruct me. This feels like a beginning, even if it does not yet feel like relief.

There are ways distance enters relationships without either person intending it. Sometimes it begins as movement. One person leaning forward into what might be. The other staying closer to what already is. At first, this difference feels negotiable, even complementary. Energy meets steadiness. Vision meets caution. Over time, though, the gap widens quietly. Not enough to name as conflict. Enough to be felt. I have been thinking about how desire can become tiring to witness.

Not desire in its raw form, but the sustained act of wanting something more than the present offers. Wanting a life that has not yet taken shape. Wanting room to grow into a self that feels unfinished. To someone else, this can sound like restlessness. Like dissatisfaction. Like refusal to be content with what is already there. No one teaches you how to translate longing. I am learning that what feels like hope from the inside can look like absence from the outside. That aspiration can register as distance even when it is not directed away from a person. Even when love is present. Even when care is genuine. There is a particular kind of heartbreak that does not come from betrayal or loss, but from misalignment. From realizing that what sustains you unsettles someone else. That the future you keep turning toward is not shared in the same way. These moments do not announce themselves with drama. They unfold through tone. Through pauses. Through a growing sense of being slightly out of step.

I wish I could say that understanding this has brought peace. Mostly, it has brought clarity, which is not the same thing. Clarity means seeing how often love asks for a narrowing of possibilities. How easily care becomes conditional on stillness. How quickly ambition is mistaken for refusal. I do not think this is cruelty. I think it is fear. The fear of being left behind by someone who is always moving.

I have been asking myself whether I know how to stay without shrinking. Whether it is possible to remain present without pretending that longing has been resolved. Whether intimacy can survive when one person’s orientation is toward elsewhere, even if that elsewhere is abstract, even if it is only a hope for coherence. These questions do not lead me anywhere. They circulate. They return at inconvenient times. In moments of quiet. In moments of tenderness. In moments when I imagine how things might have unfolded differently if wanting less had been an option. Grief sharpens these reflections. Distance amplifies them. Together, they create a strange double exposure. I am mourning what has passed while also taking stock of what I cannot seem to give up. The future continues to pull at me, even now, even here. And yet, something in me is changing.

I feel less inclined to defend my aspirations. Less interested in justifying the shape of my wanting. Not because I am certain of it, but because I am tired of explaining myself into acceptability. I am learning that some differences are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to be acknowledged and released. This does not make the loss easier. It does make it cleaner. I am beginning to understand that staying does not always mean remaining in place. Sometimes it means staying faithful to the parts of yourself that would otherwise be negotiated away. Sometimes it means allowing disappointment to exist without converting it into lesson or leverage. If there is a tenderness forming in me, it is not the tenderness of reconciliation. It is the tenderness of recognition. Of seeing clearly what cannot be forced into alignment and choosing not to punish myself for it.

I am still here. Still writing. Still listening to what feels unresolved. I do not know yet what this will become. I only know that I am trying to live closer to what feels true, even when it complicates things. Perhaps that is its own kind of staying.