Earned

"Yeah, but speaking from the perspective of someone who has a partner with anxiety issues, you don't stick around if you don't want to stick around."

"I understand what you're saying, I mean, I hear it with my rational brain, but my lizard brain sometimes has a hard time believing it."

"Your lizard brain?"

"Yeah, the irrational side of me that goes from zero to crazy in 1.2 seconds. I nicknamed it Dr. Dinosaur, from the Atomic Robo series because that's what it feels like."

She laughs out loud. "Dr. Dinosaur is seeing a therapist?"

"Along with the rest of me, yeah."

"Okay then." She waits. "It gets easier, you know?"

***

I can't stop thinking about Jane Kenyon's "Happiness."

It's a beautiful poem, one I've been reading almost daily for weeks. The opening stanza is the kind of thing that makes me cringe to think that I used to write poetry: 

There's just no accounting for happiness

and the way it turns up like  a prodigal 

who comes back to the dust at your feet

after having squandered a fortune far away. 

Can you think of a better description of happiness? 

***

Here's the thing that no one ever tells you about happiness. 

It's completely terrifying. 

At least, it has been for me. 

For years I've told myself you don't deserve to be happy.

Happiness was always something that I had to earn, and once I found my ideal job or lost twenty pounds or sorted my OCD, then I would be allowed to be happy. But I had a long, long way to go before I earned it and in the meantime I might as well make myself comfortable as slightly miserable. I mean, it couldn't be that bad.

I know, I know. I go therapy, trust me, I know.

But two years ago, happiness showed up on the same day I was unpacking my boxes after the failed North Country Experiment. It was okay (non-terrifying) for a bit because it just seemed like a houseguest.and I had earned a few months of it by taking this new job and moving home. When it stuck around I became a little . . . unsettled. It felt fraudulent and I spent a lot of time waiting for the bottom to drop out.

It didn't. And it hasn't, despite my apparent best efforts to make myself the most persnickety, least loveable human being on the planet. It stuck around and multiplied and sent Dr. Dinosaur on a rampage and landed me back in therapy wondering am I the only person who can be the happiest they've ever been and still need to see a shrink at the same time? 

Nope.

The reason for the therapy, I think, is that for the first time, I want happiness to stick around. Many of the best things in my life--my close group of friends, life in a city I adore, my boyfriend--there is no possible way I earned any of these things. And I don't want to feel like I have to earn them anymore. The therapy sucks, there is no way around it. I dread appointments the way most people dread the dentist, and I never feel quite so ohmygodthebottomisgoingtofallout Dr. Dinosaur-y as I do when I leave my appointments.

But it gets easier. Bit by bit, it seems like happiness might now be something I have to earn.