I experience happiness the way most people feel pain. It comes to me in waves and flashes, wracking my body and taking over, twisting and turning my limbs with some kind of white hot intensity. I go to sleep crying and wake up laughing, without any knowledge of what happened in the night to make this transition. So can it be said that I’m happy? When I feel happiness in such bursts and crashes that I often don’t even know it’s there at all until it disappears? It’s like, I can be walking down the street, headphones plugged in to keep thoughts and hopes and dreams from spilling out my ears, and then I’ll feel this tremor of joy. Simple euphoria washing down my skin and stripping me clean, so intense and powerful that I often feel the need to stop just to make my brain think darks instead of vibrance. Contrast instead of saturation.

I guess the point is that I am a pained individual. I’m a pitch black angel with eyeliner rings counting out years of my life like the trunk of a tree- smearing and smudging in bigger circles for every year that I grow, and for every momentary loss of innocence. I’m dressed in whale bone corsets and the silky white fabrics, designed to make me seem like a Mary or a Jane with toothy smiles and the smell of freshly baked goods wafting from my kitchen. But I’m not a girl who wears her sweater tied in a girl scout knot around her neck. I’m pallid and dirty yellow, not dripping and vivacious gold. I’m cigarette smoke and ruby red lipstick, and I enjoy falling in love with boys who don’t expect me to make them pie. I enjoy falling in love recklessly and wildly, even if it consumes me.

And I’m not saying all of this to whine, or to mope. I’m not calling attention to my lack of happiness to elicit pity, but rather to tell the world that this is how I feel happiness. And I’m tired of people telling me that I’m crazy, or that I need help. Rather, I think that they are the extraneous variable. I think that I am the one who is living life to it’s fullest- chasing it and riding it on the pursuit of some kind of feeling, so that I am never faltering in my ambition to emote- and that they are the ones who are waiting for happiness to hit them. Even if it does come more often for them. It’s the idea of not knowing when happiness is going to hit. The idea of getting along until it does, and then the pure, unadulterated shock that accompanies my periods of bliss.

For me, this is happiness. This is my definition of the word, left up to interpretation by the ones who came before us and left it so open. The world is not black and white. It is vivid reds and blues as deep as the ocean and greens with more empathy than my best friend’s eyes. The world was painted by somebody who wanted it to be explored, somebody who wanted people to see the beauty in identification and personal connection. Which is why feeling happiness the way others feel it has no appeal to me. It’s simplistic, and minimal. To feel something in a way that is so individual and unique to yourself is the way every human experience should be. Perception is a beautiful thing because only you can define it. Like, for me, the color purple may be a rich and deep color, royal and majestic. But to you, it may be the shade I see as red- bright and striking, a true warning color in itself. And can we ever really describe our perception to other people? How do you define what purple is to you, without saying simply purple? Because, to each person, their own version of purple, or their own version of happiness can vary so intensely.

But the most beautiful part of it all? Is that you will never know anyone else’s purple. You will never feel a need to make your purple like theirs, or to conform to what their ideas are. Your perception is what makes you most uniquely you, because you can never experience anybody else’s, and therefore can never aspire to be like anyone else’s. You must simply be sated with your own. And I am satisfied with my happiness- which comes in hot flashes and bright lights, and comes so individually to me. I am satisfied with omnipresent pain, and with perceiving my life and my experiences the way I choose.