Being Truly Happy

I have insomnia so I'm up tonight doing the usual - tidying up loose ends, sending out emails, cleaning the house - all the things insomniacs do. I guess we figure we're up, we might as well use the energy because at some point in day we will crash.

Anyway, so I'm up on the computer (obviously) and I just read a story about a man who used to have a 6 figure job, a family and a respectable life but then lost his job, got divorced because he fathered a child with his girlfriend, found out he had a brain tumor and eventually lost his girlfriend because he had no money. He apparently wrote a book recently that will be made into a movie. He has been working at Starbuck's as a barrista and says he's truly and fully happy for the first time in his life. This has hit a nerve with me. I think I have just come to understand something deep about myself.

In order to be truly happy, one must have courage. I'm not happy, not truly, deeply happy, because I'm afraid to be. Because I'm afraid to dismantle everything I know and everything I think I am in order to find true happiness. Deep down inside me I know that going to school is not making me happy. Having a degree won't make me happy. Staying in a dysfunctional marriage isn't making me happy. A year ago I was very tempted to pack my things (in fact, I'd started to do it) and was going to just walk out on my whole life and start over from scratch. But I stopped. I thought I'd never find a job, I'd be struggling, I wouldn't know how to live uncomfortably after being made so comfortable all these years. I would probably have to give up singing (although I wonder if I should be doing that anyway). I thought it through and decided that it's not the right time. I just don't have whatever "it" is I need to face the hardships that would surely be awaiting me. In the end, when I thought it through, I decided I wasn't so sure I'd be any happier, so I have stayed.

But somewhere, deep down in my being, I do have a longing for something different. A different existence where I wake up in the morning and take the deep fresh comforting breath of feeling that I'm doing what I want and I'm not living a lie. When I lived on my own in New York I had that feeling most mornings. It's a good feeling. I'd like to have it again.