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She was genuinely happy and a lot of people tried to figure out why and how and how to structure their life more like hers so they could have happiness too. It seemed easy enough. She ran a lot and juiced things and had a photogenic relationship with a golden retriever of a man and everybody wanted what she had.

Occasionally, people would ask her about these things in a way that communicated more than they knew. Someone would ask her how she balanced running with work and what they really meant was how did she balance her entire life and that they were struggling to do so and looked up to her greatly. Sometimes they would even say those things, but then there would be something else unsaid—they couldn’t say that they’d wanted to vent their struggles for an eternity but couldn't except online or in spaces where it was kind of a virtue to be down, but now they were saying it to someone who was actually real and happy and they were embarrassed but relieved to have said it properly. That relief also came with an unconscious expectation that now that they’d finally broken that shy confessional barrier, a remedy for their ailments would soon be theirs. They were at last at help, and they said all this wordless too.

She always felt a little bad (though not too bad) that she knew her answers were not satisfying. She told anybody who asked exactly what they’d asked for and it was always something they already knew about her and happiness or both—that if they didn’t carve out time for what was important to them then it would never happen or that it was about focusing and saying no to things they couldn’t truly commit to or that it was about doing things you love because they give you more energy. All these things were true and they felt true but the people who wanted her help would kind of slink away regardless, feeling like they’d used up all the time they deserved with her and a kind of “oh, is that it?” look behind their eyes. They blamed themselves, not her; they thought they were foolish for still not being able to achieve something which all the happy people seemed to think was simple. They wore the “I just don’t get it” defeat of someone who has resigned themselves to never understanding math but has the sense that some equation has just been explained to them as clearly as it possibly could be by an imminently disappointed tutor.

She knew it wasn’t that simple, it clearly couldn’t be if so many people she loved and who were so smart and good were struggling with it, but she never knew what else to say. She imagined, or rather drew a picture in her mind, of a big white room with lots of big white exercise balls with red hearts on them representing happiness. Everybody had their own ball but some people’s happiness had an invisible slippery barrier around it, so they could see their happiness and try to hug it or grab onto it but it just popped out between their arms, while all around them they saw other people hanging onto happiness just fine and their happiness didn’t seem slippery at all and they wondered why their own happiness wasn’t the same and what was wrong with it. She wanted to show them how to hang onto happiness but all she could ever do was hold out her arms the exact same way they were, demonstration identical in every little detail except that she could hang onto her happiness and they couldn’t.

Her happiness was very attractive, as I said, and so she received a great deal of attention which turned into a following and this made her happier still for many reasons. Among them was that many of those people she could help, and they kindly told her that she had helped, and she tried to focus on thoughts of these people because it told her that what she was doing could work and would work and was better than not trying to help at all. It told her too that maybe those other people with the slippery happinesses might get there one day and maybe it was just a time thing. But she also started a small business selling happiness-adjacent products, like running socks and ochre journals with affirmations in them and things with suns or penguins wearing little knit beanies, and she liked selling these things because she picked only things that made her happy, though also now of course because they made her money. Soon she made enough money for, practically speaking, the wedding and honeymoon and home she’d always wanted and to buy the premium brand of dog food that her border collie liked and to prepare comfortably for having kids.

Some people looked at all this and started to reason backwards that these outcomes and her trajectories to them were the reasons she had been happy all along, and that her happiness came from money and the money came from selling the idea of happiness to those people with the slippery happinesses. She could tell that people thought this, and she could tell that some of the people who started to think this way were people who would have otherwise come up to her and asked her things about work-life balance or kale. They didn’t ask her these things anymore but would still follow her around in soft orbit at events, which she guessed was out of a hope they weren't ready to let go of yet that she really was genuine after all, or perhaps out of an addiction to envy. A lot of these people had a very similar “is that it?” look behind their eyes, the difference being that they didn’t smile with this look, because to them she had become a symbol of the sacrifices you need to make to succeed in this world, those being authenticity and ethics. None of them ever said this, naturally, but she was intelligent and perceptive and she was better at disguising her observation of other people than they were at disguising their observations of her, in part because their symbolic dehumanisation of her combined with their lack of self-esteem left them totally blind to the possibility that she might be curious about who they were, too, and might be figuring them out even as she engaged with others—a multitasking entirely incompatible with their caricature of her as a one-track conwoman barely smarter than her prey.

This all felt very unfair to her, how they saw her, and she wanted to say to these people that she wanted the best for them too and she had quite a long track record of being happy and trying to help other people find happiness that wasn’t at all anything to do with making money. In fact, she thought, she wanted to lecture them a little bit, and tell them about how much effort she put into her happiness even when no-one was around, and how while yes she had overall led a happy life it hadn’t all been happy, and so she was quite proud of various decisions and efforts she’d made during those periods to produce what she had today. She wanted to introduce them to all the other people with slippery happinesses, especially those that had asked her about this or that or running socks, and ask them a little bit pointedly what they thought her occupation should be and if they would have rathered that she didn’t try to help those people at all—she couldn’t have afforded to do this full-time without charging for it somehow—and instead been a very completely different person. (She noticed they weren’t running a charity, either..) Or if they thought the world would have been a better place without the small little things she sold, which she knew weren’t vaccines or laptops or anything ‘sensible', she wasn’t dumb, but she also knew that they must like their own small things too, even decorative stupid things, and frankly she found it a little bit hypocritical to start judging those things just because she made them overtly happy and quaint—like it was some kind of sin to deliberately get about being happy or to own things that tried to make you happy. Or perhaps they thought her happy trinkets were simply uncool, too uncool for her to actually extract any happiness from, and hence the only explanation was that she was exploiting unhappy people who could believe in those things because they thought she was happy and so maybe buying the same things she had would make them happy, too.

So she felt a little maligned in this way, by their looks, and some of the time it got her down, but mostly once she realised it was one of those looks she would stop paying attention to that look or the person who wore it. She was quite good at this because she owed those people nothing, if you thought about it, they hadn’t given anything to her, but also because she was popular and active and so it was usually possible to find a more encouraging stimulus nearby—best of all an also very happy friend who was glad to see her, bounce off her, which she suspected just compounded the angst of the judger she’d left behind. That was another thing that bothered her at times—the way that some of these bitter people would look at her and her friends drinking matcha at their own table or posing for a photo like they were a clique. Of course every friendship circle is a little bit hard to access, a little bit protective, she wasn’t blind, but she never felt her friends were inaccessible to anyone who asked or came over, and she never felt she did much that other people didn’t do with their own friends, too, or that they didn’t want to do if only they would give themselves permission to relax and have fun. It wasn’t nice to view people as cliquey and arrogant just because they were popular because well there wasn’t enough time in the day to say hello to everybody and anyway what a huge and unfair burden to place on someone also trying to have their own happiness and privacy and close knit groups, but there wasn’t much she could do about that, either.

Well, she supposed, that’s another thing that bothers me, and though she did not really doubt that she was happy overall, now she has in mind a number of things that bother her and that bother her in sequence, and she starts to think is this a me thing or a them thing and can I work on it. This is how a happy person thinks—they process. They are active about getting at happiness, regaining it. They have a very strong sense that even if they are not happy now, their happiness is still within their power, and like many aspects of the human condition their belief then makes it so. So she picks some thing to do about it and starts to do it daily, and as she works on these things that bother her other little pieces of assistance come into her life—like picking up her ochre journal one morning and finding the perfect affirmation for what she’s going through. This has the feeling of serendipity, but it isn’t luck at all, is it, because she put that affirmation there in the first, she built a life with lots of little things and structures to not just keep her happy but replenish it when it faltered, cute things, multi-use things, the cowboy cactus on her desk with a mouth of big teeth and its tongue out and a lavender-rimmed thought bubble that says “LOVE ME” that makes her smile, this type of thing, and so she has a wonderful sensation of both great fortune and deserved success and within three days these things are back to not bothering her all that much. She goes to another event. She used to run this event, in fact, but now her girlfriends do and she goes to support them and bring energy to their thing like they did to hers. So she is event royalty still, it’s true, everyone knows her, and there are many who look at her in the same bothering, stifling way—psychically clawing for or at her smile.

But all she thinks today is that she is going to give as much of her happiness to people here as she can and have a great time and how proud she is of her friends—and in her whirlwind she is already gone, gone too quickly for any of us to judge or envy or assess. We are all left in her happy wake, wondering what to make of her, a crowd searchingly lost.