Seven Things (Numbers One and Two)

My attempt to find happiness – or at least cling to the brief moments of bliss that one encounters every day – has proven to be much harder than I had anticipated. I suppose that, after twenty eight years of making a habit of melancholy, I cannot be expected to change with ease. But damn – being happy is not easy.

I have become acutely aware of my every emotion, each turn of the tide and tug of the moon, the way the waves crash and break almost soundlessly and I'm sad again, angry again, seething again. That's the worst part, I think, the anger. I did not realize how angry I am. I catch myself grinding my teeth, every day. If I keep this up and there will be nothing left of me. The seething, the wrath. My muscles will seize for the pain of clenching; my teeth will be ground to powder; my heart will stop beating for the ache of it.

I catch myself feeling the anger, and I tell myself to stop. Most of my anger is directed at the distance – customers at work, people on the bus, commercials and TV shows, magazines, the person ahead of me in line at Starbucks. None of this matters, and when I remind myself of this, the anger falls back, like the tide receding. I know it will surge forward soon, but I have learned the ways of water and waves, and I have learned how to control this, only this.

I am exhausted every day.

But the envy is always with me. This I have tried to escape, but I don't know how, yet. There are moments when it feels like I have nothing, and the world owes me everything, but I will never, ever have anything. It seems like everyone I speak to has the thing I want, although if you ask me to define this thing, it is nothing, it nothing but a nebulous sense of what's owed to me. Although I am owed nothing.

Some mornings while I wait for the bus, I try to list five things that I am grateful for. Some mornings this comes naturally, and I find five things that matter, five things that give my life purpose and truth beyond envy. Some mornings, though, that girl who lives across the street from the bus stop sits with me, and she is beautiful and thin and has an adorable pink phone, and I cannot think for the hot red envy rushing through me.

But this is something I'm working on, something I am striving towards – the letting go of envy. If you've figured out how to do it, let me know. Or don't – after all, it will probably just piss me off that you got there first.