The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

1

“I run a burlesque dancing troupe.”

I draw muscles in medical textbooks.”

“I sell an aspirational online existence.”

I stared at the girl with neon-pink hair sitting across the picnic table at the downtown hostel bar, smiled and raised my eyebrows, and took a sip of beer.

I was twenty-nine years old and sitting at a picnic table, a year after a divorce, a year of living alone, a year of therapy, and finally deciding to try online dating. I posted a profile I hoped was authentic. Quirks, weirdness, warts, and all. I spent so long thinking about who I was and what I needed that I had whittled it down to five words: Curious, Creative, Romantic, Optimistic, Ambitious.

I hoped that would all add up to fun and interesting and weird.

As John Lennon said, “It’s weird not to be weird.”

I wrote about my love of peeling a clementine into one big snaking peel, the dusty warm air before a thunderstorm, and putting one macaroni noodle on each spoke of the fork while eating it. I wrote about how I always peek behind the shower curtain when I’m brushing my teeth to make sure nobody’s hiding there. About how I arrange my books in the Dewey Decimal System. About my inability to use a hammer, walk up two flights of stairs without losing my breath, or properly tie my shoelaces. Quirks, weirdness, warts, and all.

Flash-forward a few days and I was suddenly meeting characters from across the city. Interesting people. Out of the woodwork. Where were they all my life? I had coffee with the director of a ballet, went jogging with someone who’d founded a food co-op, and met up with a marketing exec at a coffee-shop lecture about life in the year 3000.

I was having a blast and finally falling in love with myself.

So what’s the simple way to master your most important relationship?

Be you.

Be you.

Be you and be cool with it.

There is nobody else you can be better. There is so much of you unique to the world. The deep-down version of you is the best version of all. You are unique and complicated. You are different and dimensional. Those rare thoughts, those flying thoughts, those late-night thoughts, grab on to those and hold them. Those things you think, those things you do, those things you say, those are what slowly helps define who you are to yourself.

Nobody knows every thought in your head. But you do. You hear your thoughts. You should follow them.

Be you.

For you.

Do you know why it’s critical to display your true self at work and school and home?

Because:

There is nothing more satisfying than being loved for who you are and nothing more painful than being loved for who you’re not but pretending to be.