Are You Happy? – 2022

It is 4:21am on the morning of January 5th. It’s a Wednesday. So far, I have been unable to fall asleep – more than likely my own fault, a mixture of a late day nap and on-screen consumption continued even after I went to bed. I knew this was bound to happen, as it has so many times before, yet I still find myself a bit surprised at my lack of determination from keeping it from happening again. I know I have work tomorrow – or, rather, today – for which I need to be logged in by nine. I know that I will feel like utter shit, requiring copious amounts of caffeine and a few ibuprofen to even feel half-way alright. I know that I will be irritable, exhausted, a little depressed, and it will make my day demonstrably worse than had I just gone to sleep at eleven or twelve when I laid down for bed.
I’ve had this same problem since I was in school, and it doesn’t show any signs of stopping, despite numerous attempts to buckle down and start good habits now that I’m well into adulthood. This seems to be emblematic of much of my adult life thus far – and the only comfort is knowing that whilst I feel like I’m a complete and utter wreck most of the time, day to day – there are people that are way worse than me, and I have time to turn this ship around… even if it takes another five years.

2021 felt like a retread – a crash course if you will – of all of the bad things that have come with growing up and everything that I have experienced in the past five years since I really entered adulthood, which coincidentally is around the same time that I wrote the first ‘Are You Happy?’ little yearly recap. In 2017 I had graduated high school, moved into my first apartment with my girlfriend, went through some trials and tribulations in said relationship, jumped around from terrible job to terrible job, and had a lot of monetary troubles trying to keep what was essentially two teenagers pretending to be grown-ups afloat. I had a lot of anxiety and depression that year, had my fair share of mental spirals, wrote a lot of poetry, and kept thinking about where I was steering the ship that was my life.
In 2021, I was still – like many others around me – facing the continued consequences of the global pandemic. The health anxiety, the mental weariness that came with feeling like two years of your life just blinked away, the frustration in a country that had far too many empty headed troglodytes actively fighting against making any progress in trying to rid ourselves of a massive, once in a lifetime, deadly pandemic that has firmly set itself as a near permanent fixture of life for the near future… remember when we all thought this might only take like three to six months? Ha. Haha. Hahaha…
I had some minor relationship problems with the same girlfriend – now wife – that luckily got resolved pretty quickly. My job, which I’ve been at for nearly three years, is devolving into a massive shit show pretty quickly and is threatening to destabilize one of the few stable things in my life. I wrote a lot of poetry. I had a lot of monetary troubles trying to keep myself – essentially three children stacked on top of one another in a trench coat – and my wife afloat and moving forward. My birthday hit me like a ton of bricks. The world flew by in a flash. Everything was nearly a constant rotation of anxiety – fear – frustration – brief moment of happiness – and a lot of pulling myself out of auto pilot.
And yet – I have to reconcile a lot of that with the simple, objective fact that a lot of good came out of this year.
My wife and I adopted a cat – a tuxedo cat with a cloudy right eye that we named Mister Moody. For most of the year, our jobs were stable and steady and consistent. I finished my latest collection of poetry. We managed to keep ourselves from catching the above mentioned deadly virus. We went on a couple of lovely trips. I finished the half-sleeve of tattoos on my left arm.
But above all – the one thing that gave way to 95% of all good to come out of 2021 – my wife and I found out that she was pregnant, and we were expecting a little girl who is set to arrive in February and will most likely be the source of all good to come out of 2022. Most of the year was lived in excitement and anticipation for our daughter, our Audrey, to join us in 2022 after spending nearly three years trying.

I will be twenty-five this year. Maybe this time I’ll actually feel it and get to celebrate it, if I’m lucky. The past two years have just gone by in the blink of an eye, leaving a version of me that constantly feels stuck and is trying to pull myself back to the present instead of living in a echo of a time that doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for quite some time. I will be a father this year. My wife and I are planning on looking for a house – still renting, of course, because we’re in our early twenties and we live in a time where we’ll probably never be granted the luxury of owning a home – once our lease is up where we are currently at.
There is also a lot of uncertainty. A lot of things that we cannot plan and have no way of anticipating. The Pandemic Era has shown me that you can’t really try to have things set in stone; there’s a lot more ‘going with the flow’ than I typically am comfortable with, but am learning to understand and cope with nonetheless. We live in terribly interesting times and I direly wish the world would get just a little bit boring for a while, especially while my daughter is young. But I’ve been trying my absolute damnedest to stop focusing on what seems inevitable and to start focusing on having a little hope.

Last year, I ended the post with the conclusion that despite what might come later, I was – in that very moment in time – happy. The very question in which five years of posting had hinged on was finally answered… and maybe I should’ve left it there. Because this year, in this moment, I have to admit that I am not very happy. It is now past five in the morning, and I have to be logged into work in four hours – I have a kitchen to clean, and a cat box to empty, and bills to be paid, and furniture moved, and baby equipment to assemble, and credit cards with far too much money on them and I still have far too much anxiety and my back hurts and I’m trying to find a new job and there is so much to plan and to clean and prepare for and so many things that have been left unresolved and I don’t have an answer for just yet…
It all may seem trivial. I know it does. But I want to be honest and I’m tired of my old trope of just being vague and apathetic and melancholy without any firm foundation for it.
I am not happy right now.
And that’s okay.
Because just like last year, where I was sure of how I felt in that moment, I know that I have a year ahead of me and things will change – I’m just looking for life to get a little bit better. Well, a lotta bit better if it can, but I’m not trying to push my luck.
I am not very happy right now. That is okay. I understand that it is okay. Because as corny as it sounds, I do have just a little bit of hope filling in some of the places where hopefully someday happiness will be.
And I guarantee you that in February, when I’m holding my daughter in my arms for the first time – I will know more love and more happiness then I even know what to do with.

Now, if you excuse me, I’m going to try and get a little bit of sleep before the sun starts to rise.

And from the bottom of my heart, I truly hope that you’re happy – or at least on the way.