I borrowed happiness and forget to return

I remember the first time I laughed after the breakdown.

It was at a stranger's joke—one of those cliché dad puns about elevators always bringing people down. Everyone chuckled, but I felt something different: a ripple of joy I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t mine. It felt borrowed—like I had slipped into someone else’s life for a second, then returned to my regularly scheduled numbness.

That was the moment I realized: I was surviving on secondhand happiness.

My therapist, Dr. Hensley, always wore warm sweaters and had the kind of voice you’d expect from an audiobook narrator. She said healing was nonlinear. I told her my life was too. I never walked in a straight line—I zigzagged between trauma and performance, between smiles and suppression.

“So, tell me what joy means to you,” she asked once.

I told her joy was something other people had in curated Instagram reels. It looked like golden-hour photos, yoga retreats, and oat milk lattes with symmetrical foam art.

She wrote something down and nodded.

I didn’t tell her about my childhood then. That came later—when I stopped treating therapy like a performance review.

I had built my life like a Pinterest board. Everything had its place: color-coded schedules, daily gratitude journals, avocado toast plated with microgreens. I smiled like I meant it and shared inspirational quotes like I lived by them.

But inside? There was a void wearing a designer coat.

I was praised for being “put together.” Friends called me resilient, strong, admirable. No one knew I cried during dental cleanings—not from pain, but because the hygienist’s gentle voice cracked open something inside me.

I borrowed smiles from sitcoms and mimicked emotions from romcoms. I studied joy like it was a foreign language. I could fake it fluently. But I never felt fluent in my own emotions.

It took six months of therapy to admit what happened in the basement.

My father was a military man. Stoic. Unbending. Our house echoed with silence and discipline. At eight years old, I spilled juice on his briefcase. He didn’t yell. He didn’t hit. He simply picked up the briefcase, wiped it clean, and locked me in the basement for two hours.

The lightbulb didn’t work. I remember counting the seconds in the dark, humming the alphabet to keep myself from screaming. When he let me out, he told me to smile. “People don’t like crybabies,” he said.

So I stopped crying.

So I smiled more.

So I learned to feel safe in the dark, but terrified in the light of other people’s expectations.

“You don’t seem depressed,” a friend once told me. “You’re always laughing.”

I told her I was good at pretending.

Pretending became survival. And survival became habit. And habit became identity. Until one day, I forgot who I was beneath all the coping mechanisms.

I filled my calendar with yoga, meditation, therapy, journaling—yet still, something was missing. I was patching bullet holes with stickers.

I didn't want happiness—I wanted relief. I didn’t want joy—I wanted rest.

Social media told me healing looked like sunrise hikes and smoothie bowls. It didn't show the nights I stayed up screaming into pillows, trying not to break.

I was tired of the narrative that trauma made you stronger. Sometimes, trauma just made you tired.

Dr. Hensley once said, “You’re not broken. You’re responding to a world that asked too much and gave too little.”

That sentence cracked open something inside me.

It wasn’t just about trauma. It was about the pressure to be okay despite it.

There was a phase where I clung to joy like a loan. I "borrowed" happiness from other people's stories—watched YouTube videos of strangers proposing, read memoirs of survival, listened to music with lyrics that didn’t apply to me but still made me cry.

I wondered: is it okay to feel joy that isn’t yours?

Dr. Hensley said yes.

Sometimes we need to borrow light until we find our own.

But eventually, we have to stop borrowing and start building.

I stopped meditating perfectly. I started screaming into the void without apology. I allowed myself to sob during commercials and let my coffee go cold without guilt.

I quit my productivity addiction cold turkey.

I told friends when I was not okay—and watched as they stayed.

I started coloring outside the lines and let myself feel things without filtering them through logic or aesthetics.

One night, I danced alone in my apartment, not to impress, but because my body asked for movement.

I laughed—really laughed—at something dumb and unimportant.

And I didn’t question it.

I don’t know if I ever returned that borrowed happiness.

Maybe I did. Maybe I paid it forward, smiled at a stranger, held space for a friend, shared my story in a way that helped someone else breathe easier.

Or maybe I simply turned borrowed joy into something real—like a library book you forget to return because it became a part of your story.

I don’t feel perfect.

I feel human.

And in a world obsessed with curated bliss, maybe humanity is the bravest kind of happiness.

If you’ve ever felt like an imposter in your own joy, you’re not alone.

If you’ve ever borrowed happiness because your own well was dry, that doesn’t make you weak—it makes you resourceful.

And if you’ve ever performed wholeness while crumbling inside: I see you.

Healing isn’t aesthetic. It’s messy, nonlinear, painful, and slow. But sometimes, through the mess, something beautiful begins to grow.

Not perfection. Not performance.

Just... peace.