Happiness is for other people.

The most you can expect for yourself are rare, short-lived moments of joy.

You've felt that way from childhood.

Only, then, you gave your circumstances other names: loneliness, anxiety, self-doubt.

But you presented yourself as a happy person. You were always good at pretending.

Your sister asks: Don’t you have any happy childhood memories? You recall only solitary moments, engrossed in some fictional world or mathematical puzzle.

They were forms of escape. Happiness could only be found elsewhere.

You spent your childhood years plotting your escape.

What you hadn't realized yet: Wherever you go, there you are! You dogged yourself, from school to college, city to city, even continent to continent. (You were the constant.)

You could no longer deny it when, despite taking steps coming out as gay, despite starting things you'd always said you wanted -- poetry and photography, for example, and modern dance -- little changed.

A thundercloud descended on you. Your every day now held an oppressive weight, seconds and minutes and hours to be got through. The color of your days was a thundercloud purple for three years.

You managed to finish your PhD and looked forward to starting over again. The respite was brief. The thundercloud tightened its stranglehold.

Even joy seemed impossible. You had a good job, a respectable relationship, some close friends: nothing mattered.

Life stretched endlessly and painfully and purposelessly ahead of you.

If a plane went down with you in it, you'd be okay with that.

You brooded: Did you need a different life? A different job, perhaps, a different relationship, new friends?

You desperately sought something that could give you atleast a semblance of a life. (Life or something like it.)

You ended your relationship, quit your job. (Though, really, you couldn't have hung on to them much longer anyway.)

You decided to build a life around writing. It would surely give purpose and structure. (Also, hopefully, break up the seeming endlessness. Each book could be new chapter, another beginning).

You accepted the thundercloud as a fact of life.

You clung to the novel you began as to a lifejacket.

But the novel also became a rock weighing you down as years passed.

Your life shrunk to a shell around it.

Starting therapy and going on medication didn't seem to help. You stopped both after a few years.

When your novel is finally done, you're sick to your stomach. Is this all you have to show for ten years? Now people will (rightly) judge you.

The book release approaches. You dread promoting your book. You want to hide, disappear.

Every mention of your book (and there are many, thanks to your wonderful publisher & publicist) turns to ashes in your mouth.

You find an emergency therapist. You tell him: I haven't been able to celebrate my book. He says: Be in the present. Buy yourself a cupcake.

You cry: How do I just 'be'? Teach me how to be present. I've tried mindfulness. He yells at you: I've already told you how.

You break up with him over email the next day.

You get through your book events without giving anything away. (You were always good at presenting a front.) You even allow a friend to throw you a party.

You fumble through your days in a daze. The simplest decisions are beyond you. You stop writing. (You can't write anything anyway.)

You find a new therapist and go back on medication (a higher dose).

Your new therapist advises you: Make your bed every morning. Count that as an accomplishment. You pin a note with that message to your wall.

You go through the motions of living again. It takes you two years to start writing again.

You realize you asked too much of writing the first time. It can support you, it can't save you. You can't make it your entire life.

You understand you don't need a single large overarching purpose to live. Many small purposes will do.

To learn. To create. To contribute. To support. To cherish. These will do.

One day, another two years later, you stand in a rapeseed field and note that you are happy. The dazzling yellow flowers make you happy.

Happiness is possible after all, you think.

Perhaps the secret to happiness is to be able to recognize when you're happy.

Perhaps the trick to happiness is to remember you were happy (at least) once.