11:11

On big joy, little joy and being completely covered in butterflies.

Whenever I catch the clock at 11:11, I make a wish.

This seems to happen more often than I’d expect, although that is, of course, the way human brains work. I don’t remember the times I look at the clock and it isn’t 11:11. There you go, a cynical little reassurance that I’m an adult who understands confirmation bias and who doesn’t really believe in magic, a position somewhat undermined by my making wishes whenever I can.

When I have the chance, I almost always wish for the same thing: to be happy. Does telling your wish mean that it won’t come true? I hope not, or at least I hope that telling you about wishes in general and not a single specific wish opens up a little loophole with the powers that be. That’s what I’d argue in a court of law. The legal frameworks require clarification, your honour.

Anyway, the point is that I wish for happiness. Just happiness. I’ve lost track of the things I’ve wished for throughout my life in the pursuit of happiness. A book deal (success), a part in Oliver the musical (fail), green eyes (success), bigger boobs (fail), a cute Irish boyfriend (success), a brain that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to kill me half the time (fail). And what I’ve mostly learned is that I’m actually quite bad at predicting what will make me happy. And that largely, happiness arrives as a glorious surprise, a spring opening up somewhere in your soul.

I think often of that old saying about happiness and butterflies. You know the one: if you chase it, you’ll never catch it, but if you sit still, it’ll settle gently on you. And I reckon it’s true in lots of ways. I’m reliably at my happiest when I stop and notice and appreciate what I have. But like a butterfly, my happiness is easily startled, easily frightened away.

I’ve always been a person with Great Big Feelings. I’m easily delighted and easily upset, quick to lose my temper. I love in a way that makes me feel like my body can’t hold it, like it’s stretching me, pouring out of my pores. I cry at musicals and starry skies and adverts for dog biscuits. I’ve often felt ashamed of these huge feelings and shame, too, feels enormous, a dark, cloying thing, crawling up my back and wrapping my throat in its long fingers. The inside of my head is like a pinball machine, all flashing lights and crashing sounds, tiny little nudges capable of sending my emotions skittering wildly in a new direction.

And the trouble with that is - god, why are our brains wired like this? - I allow the bad to push me around more than the good. I miss the traffic lights, and then I step in a wet patch in my socks, and then I break a glass, and the day is ruined. Maybe the week. Maybe, actually, my whole life. Because isn’t everything always like this? And maybe this time, I’ll feel like this forever.

It’s endlessly, infuriatingly easy to let the good fade into the background. Sometimes I’m afraid that my happiness is a blip. A little spell of sunshine on my face, before I sink back into my default sadness. It’s a destructive, tempting thought, as compulsive and painful as picking a scab. It’s also a lie.

I wonder what would happen if I was able to point my Great Big Feelings in the other direction. To allow the tiny everyday joys to lift and delight me as much as I allow the everyday annoyances to deflate me. To see contentedness as the default and accept that every day, I’m likely to experience things that nudge me in different directions. To know that my feelings are powerful but they can’t hurt me, that happiness is there waiting for me when I’m ready to return to it. To feel my feet on solid ground, even as the storm rages around me.

It’s not a new thought, and many, many cleverer people than me have written about it. But if I thought that way, I’d never write anything. There’s nothing new under the sun and we’re all here telling our stories to each other, learning the same truths, experiencing the same revelations, burning our hands on the hot oven again and again and again until the lesson sticks. What if I’m covered in goddamn butterflies but I can’t see them because I have both eyes fixed on the spider in the corner?

This metaphor has got out of control. Why do all my metaphors get out of control?

I recently heard someone clever - maybe it was Sophie Cliff, or maybe it was Josie George, or maybe it was my Auntie Helen - talking about how fundamentally, big joy and little joy are the same. That we can extract the same amount of happiness from a cup of tea in a sunny garden as we do from a big snazzy holiday. That a night in your pyjamas with a pizza and a glass of wine can be every bit as wonderful as a glamorous night out on the town.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling low, I’ll decide that I’m going to have a Nice Day. And on those days, it’s the little joys that I reach for. I’ll get up early and go for a walk. I’ll put on some lipstick or paint my nails. I’ll cook something lovely for lunch. I’ll try my best at work, and then log off as soon as the day is done. I’ll cuddle my cat, and my boyfriend. And at the turn of the year, I made a resolution. What if, I thought, what if most days had it in them to be nice days? So far, I haven’t been very good at following through on that.

Shame, you devil, you, how did you get into this post?

What I meant to say, is that I’m trying my best, but sometimes it’s hard. When I wrote before about burning out, I promised another post at another time about the fact that I’m either pedal to the metal or I’ve ground to a halt, and how I’ve always been bad at the in-between. And now here we are in that other post at that other time! It’s funny, I didn’t know this was what I was going to write about today, and now I don’t know how I thought I was going to write about anything else.

Anyway, the in-between. Focus, Fiona, jesus, otherwise we’ll be here all day.

When I was burning out, I wrote about the constant feeling of just trying to get through. The certainty that my life was waiting for me on the other side of this busy period, this work event, this appointment, this difficult conversation. And of course, life doesn’t wait for you at all. It happens, one second sliding into the next, whether you’re paying attention or not. Ready or not, here it comes. All of it is life: the good, the bad, the ugly, the indifferent, all of our finite moments, running through our fingers while we’re gazing at the horizon. If I’m waiting for my world to be perfect before I’m happy, I’ll be waiting a long, long time.

I’m writing this at my kitchen table, a cup of tea beside me in my big Scrabble tile mug, a breeze streaming through the open patio door from the garden, where I can see my anemones starting to lift their cheerful red and white heads. I’m being attacked by a curtain and my tea is actually sort of cold and my boyfriend’s hayfever is trying to kill him and the electrician hasn’t come by to move our light even though he said he would and the cat is out there somewhere, probably getting heatstroke, instead of coming inside and lying in the shade. I can see a butterfly flitting around my flowerpots, which feels so on the nose that I almost didn’t include it. And I’m happy. It’s lovely. It’s all so lovely.

So I’m going to keep trying. I’m going to keep trying to accept that life is a walk in the sunshine and a hard conversation at work and being nominated for an award and not winning the award and sharing a bottle of wine with my mum and yanking a tick out of the cat’s neck and watching the briar roses scramble over my garden like a wildfire and my hair refusing to sit nice for a single goddamn day of my goddamn life. I’m going to keep trying to take the bad with the good. I’m going to count my butterflies.