My goal was never to lead a happy life, but rather to lead a peaceful one. I don’t need things or people to “make me happy.”

Alls I need is my peace. The people, things, places that add to my peace are welcome in my life. The ones that don’t, I strut my stuff away from.

Joy is great, but like most emotions, it’s fickle and fleeting. What’s more is that joy/happiness isn’t even the most powerful emotion. It’s not the second, no, and not the third either. It actually comes in 4th in terms of potency (the order goes: fear, anger, sorrow, joy).

So why have we been throat-fucked so brutally by this happily-ever-after bullshit? Personally, I hate being asked if I’m happy because I don’t like lying and my honest answer is, “I’m mostly miserable, but I find moments of joy.”

Though I’m less miserable now than I’ve ever been, I wouldn’t say I walk around happy all the time, or most of the time, or even a third of the time. Life is tough and tender and I surf the curves of all sorts of emotions, some of which I barely understand.

Recently, I realized that I was hating on sympathy because it reminds me so much of pity, which I despise. Sometimes they’re hard to distinguish, but in reality they’re like fruit-flies and misquotes. Sympathy is the annoying fruit-fly. It means well, it thought you left the food out to share. Pity, the menacing mosquito, is a sneaky bastard with no regard for you at all.

So I’m going to explore emotions a bit more, all of them, big and small. I want to understand the things I feel because I feel so much and naming them looks like liberation to me.