Plural

"Well, I mean, Kelly is plural now and we have to start taking that into account."

I start laughing and end up with beer up my nose. It's been a really long week, and I'm--we're, I suppose--hanging out and having pizza and beer with one of my old roommates. She's tired and a little frazzled, talking to her husband about how we need to see one another more often and the difficulty of coordinating schedules.

After coughing the carbonation out of my lungs I say: "What a funny way of thinking about it."

She shrugs. "I always thought it was kind of nice."

***

I'm going to be sad to see 2014 go.

It feels like a selfish sentiment, given the general fucked up-ness of the past twelve months. But the truth is that grim global realities aside, 2014 has been the best year of my life. 

Independent of the whole ohmygodLOVE thing, this year has been fantastic. I celebrated a year in the Twin Cities, packed suitcases, took cross-country flights, and crossed finish lines and things off my  my 30x30 list.

This has been a great year. 

Here's the funny thing. 

All of those things felt really good. I love marking things off of to-do lists and travel is always deeply satisfying. 

That's not what made this year wonderful. 

During the course of the past year I've felt less and less like I was waiting for the bottom to drop out on me. Work has felt manageable, my family is healthy, I live in a city I love surrounded by people I cherish. Things feel more stable now than they have in a long time. Until this weekend, I had a really hard time pinning down what, exactly, was so different about 2014.

***

I'm happy. 

That's it. There are no qualifiers or addendum to the statement. That's what changed in 2014, and it's such a simple thing, I feel like I should be embarrassed that it took me so long to figure out. But I spent so long with depression and anxiety that I forgot what it felt like to live without them. And even in the process of getting better things were still kind of bad. But over the course of the past year, my worst days have become roughly equivalent to what my best days used to be. 

Happiness has stopped feeling tenuous. 

Partly, I expect, from therapy and sorting out any number of things that I had repressed for awhile. Partly from learning triggers and healthy coping mechanisms and any number of the other tedious grown-up things you learn to do in therapy. Partly from falling in love.

Being plural has a lot to do with it. 

Not just the simple being plural of being in a couple, but the complicated, beautiful, crazy feeling of having a group of people who love you and have your well-being in mind, people who bring you pho when you're sick, let you cry on their couch when you're sad, celebrate your successes and milestones and let you be a part of theirs.  

They make happiness feel like maybe, this year, it might be permanent.