Truly Happy Didn’t Start Where I Thought It Would

December 2025

In March of 2008, I wrote a short line in my journal about happiness.

I didn’t say much — just that being truly happy with who you are, and being able to express it, is a breakthrough. That real happiness requires looking at yourself honestly, fixing what’s yours to fix, and making peace with the past.

At the time, I don’t think I understood how radical that realization was.

I hadn’t changed my life yet.
I hadn’t moved anywhere new.
I hadn’t disrupted what felt familiar or safe.

But something had already shifted.

What I see now is that happiness didn’t arrive as a feeling — it arrived as clarity. A quiet knowing that my life could not stay the same if I wanted to be honest with myself. That happiness wasn’t something waiting for me in another person, another relationship, or another version of me.

It was something I had to build.

Months later, I would uproot the only life I had ever known and move to Casper, Wyoming — a place that, unexpectedly, became one of the first spaces where I truly understood my own boundaries. Where happiness wasn’t loud or performative, but steady. Earned. Mine.

Looking back, Casper wasn’t the beginning of my happiness.
It was the confirmation of it.

The beginning happened quietly — on paper — when I first admitted that happiness required responsibility. That I couldn’t outrun my past, but I could learn from it. That fixing myself wasn’t an act of shame, but of respect.

True happiness, I’ve learned, doesn’t always announce itself.
Sometimes it starts as a sentence you don’t yet know how to finish.