happiness.

how’s everyone doing? are we making it through this pale winter? are we going on our little walks? will the nightmares ever cease?

like many people, this sad watery part of the year is historically my spiral szn. it’s not so much a seasonal depression thing (if only my depression were strictly seasonal, lol. As my mother would say, “New Year’s Eve is amateur hour if you’re an alcoholic,” and as I would say, “seasonal depression is amateur hour if you have major depression.” It’s a way of feeling cool for having depression! It doesn’t work!)

of course, the dip around this time of year is obviously, in part, seasonal. the darkness without echoes the darkness within, etc. i feel inclined to acknowledge it every year.

and yet (she whispers) this year i feel okay. if i’m being honest — i’m happy. like, really happy.

it’s because of many things, probably. london makes me happy. all this time with christian makes me happy. i’ve been jolted out of so much of my regular life this year that parts of my brain feel almost reset (or as i said to christian the other day, “this must be why they used to electrocute us”). maybe it’s all the meditating my friend rachel has finally influenced me to do. or the right combo of meds. or the fact that it’s a leap year! who knows??

i’m fighting against the superstition in me that to talk about happiness is to invite disaster. because this bit of happiness has allowed me to think about this time of year a bit differently, and i’m trying that on for size.

over the last few months, the image of a deep sea diver has kept coming up in my writing. i watched The Deepest Breath during a bout of insomnia back in September, and i’ve been obsessed with freediving ever since. (ask me about the mammalian diving response and how the human lung can shrink to the size of a lemon!) Maybe it’s been growing in me for some time — the whole Titanic submersible thing last summer, and the autumn before that, I read and ferociously loved Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, and before that, the sea was a part of my grief, too.

either way — for a while now, I’ve been writing and dreaming over and over about sinking to the bottom of the ocean and swimming along the sea floor.

i used to think this image was telling me something about loss. like, dropping out of the surface world and disappearing somewhere dark. it probably was. but lately i’ve been thinking about the very quiet quality of that deep-diving, the way a diver can’t do much except float and listen. which, it turns out, is what a lot of meditating is like. floating & listening.

when i first started meditating at the end of last year, i absolutely hated the word “mindfulness” or the phrase “being present.” they felt played out and annoying and i couldn’t help hearing them in a grating, self-satisfied voice.

i studiously avoided any guided meditations with those words, and did a lot of what felt like nothing. i tried being on my empty mind shit, like sza said. in the past i’ve sometimes referred to this as “bird brain time.” i hate to tell you this, because i have always despised the recommendation to meditate, but something did happen to me, the more i did that.

what happened is, i began to believe the metaphysical fact that happiness does only happen in the present. i felt it in a way i couldn’t deny. i am the most happy when i’m able to float, and be, and accept me and my loved ones for the messy wonky mortals we are. and you can’t do that in the past, or the future. just right now.

so it turns out that deep sea diving may be a more expansive metaphor than i first thought. it might even contain happiness inside it! not as a final destination, but as a phenomenon, like gravity or osmosis. one i might be becoming more familiar with.