I’ve stopped expecting to feel happy all the time.
It sounds simple, but it’s taken me a long time to say that without guilt. For a while, I believed that happiness was the point. That if I could just organize my life the “right” way, get the work/life balance dialed in, drink enough water, stay grounded in gratitude.. I could hold onto it, bottle it up somehow. Keep it from slipping away.
But happiness doesn’t work like that.
It moves. It changes. It lifts, then leaves. It arrives in these swift little moments and then quietly disappears when you're not paying attention. Your baby letting out a belly laugh. A nostalgic song while you're driving. The safety and familiarity of your partner coming in for a hug. These experiences are golden — but they’re not meant to stretch across days like a kind of guarantee. They’re brief, fleeting.
For a while, I treated that as a problem to fix. When the feeling faded, I looked for what I was doing wrong. Was I not grateful enough? Was I too tired, too busy, too caught up in something else? But all that did was make the absence feel even heavier.