What I Learned in 2023: The Source of My Happiness Is Inside Myself

Atlanta, GA
12/31/23

At first, I wasn’t going to write this. Or at least I wasn’t going to publish it. It felt tone deaf, insensitive or maybe even obnoxious to write about the great year I’ve had when, globally, it’s been a pretty shitty one. As I write this, wars in Gaza and Ukraine rage on, and that’s hardly an exhaustive list of the human suffering happening right now. While life is so difficult for so many, it felt wrong to share how good it’s been for me.

But then I read the following in a blog post written by someone I had recently interviewed for a story in my ongoing coverage of psychedelic medicine: “Joy is an emotion we suppress far too often.” I knew that by avoiding writing about what this year has been like for me, I was suppressing joy. And, true to my usual form, I wanted to sweep my joy under the rug because I felt guilty about it.

But now I’ll come out and say it, 2023 was the best year of my entire life.

First, I realized a dream that I’d had and been deferring for 30 years. I was 17 years old the first time I started dreaming of a trip to Japan. I was 47 when I got there – the last leg of a 10-week journey through Asia. Of course, that trip took up less than 20% of the year that I’m calling the best one of my entire life, but what a weight to take something off of your to-do list that has been languishing there for so long mostly because you were afraid to do it.

And fear wasn’t the only thing holding me back, which is another reason that blog post about suppressing joy spoke to me. He wrote, “Why do you withhold joy from yourself? …Why do we deny ourselves some of the most beautiful emotions and experiences provided to us in this beautiful Universe?”

I can tell you why I do it: Again, it's guilt. Every time I deferred that Asia trip over the last 30 years was because of guilt. Sometimes it was towards my family who might need me. Other times, it was towards a boyfriend at the time, who’d be left behind.

So I started 2023 with a resolution, “No boyfriends till you go to SE Asia.” The short version of the story is that I managed to keep that resolution. You can read the longer version here.

How I started 2023 without a boyfriend was because of a fantasy I’d had and deferred for 30 years. From September 2021 to August 2022, I was in a relationship with a man I had idealized since I was 16. He had been my boyfriend in high school, and we just never quite moved on. Through marriages (both of ours), children (his), and multiple moves to different cities and countries, we never forgot about each other and both, each in our own way, harbored a fantasy of ending up back together one day. In 2021, we finally did, and 11 months later, it ended in colossal heartbreak for me.

But again, what a joy (an eventual joy, haha) to release the weight of something you’ve wanted for 30 years. And, my god, what an invaluable life lesson it taught me. (But MY GOD was I really not smart enough to have known this already?! Geez!) The lesson: When you idealize a human being, you won’t see any of their flaws, and we are all flawed. None of us is ideal.

Nothing about this man looked good on paper. Literally everything was a red flag. When I say everything, I mean everything. Had I met him online or in a social setting as a perfect stranger and learned the things I learned about him, I never would have pursued a relationship with him. There was nothing about him or his current situation that made him an eligible candidate to be a boyfriend. And, to his credit, he told me this on many occasions (while sometimes simultaneously plowing ahead with our relationship, occasionally at lightspeed). When you idealize a person, you can find an explanation for everything. That part wasn’t his fault. It was mine.

I hope that 2022 was the last time I had to learn the lesson I first heard from Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” Ignoring that advice has been my entree into far too many relationships.

Instead, I was living the lines from Fleishman Is In Trouble, a book and later a mini-series about, in part, a sad-sack divorced dad who finds acceptance among his old friends from high school.

“It had been so long since he felt accepted, like he didn’t have to justify his existence, that people just took him on his own terms. Maybe this was the key – to spend time with people who knew you when you were all potential. Maybe, in some way, you remained all potential to them. Your mistakes were anomalies to them.”

Yes, all I saw when I looked at this man was potential. All his mistakes were anomalies to me.

It took getting over that first 30-year-old fantasy in 2022 to realize my 30-year-old dream in 2023.

I spent the first quarter of 2023 planning that trip – an exercise in courage. Hitting “submit,” “send,” “purchase,” “book” on piece after piece of that journey, feeling my belly go cold every time I booked another flight, another boat, another room, and then doing it again and again until there was no turning back. But I was scared until I got on the plane, all nerves and jitters, which only escalated as my departure drew nearer.

But within about 24 hours of landing in Chiang Mai, where I stayed for the first month of my trip, all that fear was replaced by bliss. I was safe, I was fine, and goddammit I had done the thing.

Over the course of those 10 weeks, I came to realize, and eventually started saying out loud, “I have never been happier in all my life.”

That bliss came first from being in true alignment with what I have long felt to be my highest calling: to see as much of this world as I can while I’m in it. It was a bliss that I feel every time I get back out there. I felt it when I moved to Brazil and on every subsequent visit, and I’ve felt it on solo trips to Malta, Sicily, Mexico, New Mexico and so on.

But on this last trip, the bliss was so much bigger. I mean, I felt like I was on something (and I was, but more on that later**). Part of the outsized bliss was the dopamine cascade I felt every time I packed my little carry-on for the next destination: an island in the southern gulf of Thailand, Bangkok, Singapore, Cambodia, numerous stops in Vietnam, and that many more in Japan. What a rush it was every few days to few weeks when I said, “Tomorrow I’m going somewhere new!” I confess, I was afraid I’d gotten addicted to this feeling and that I’d surely broken my brain’s internal reward system to a point that once I got back to Atlanta, I might never feel joy again. And, boy, doesn’t this speak volumes about our tendency to suppress or deny ourselves joy. I literally thought that if I kept getting so much of it, I might break my brain. I think some religions may say something similar about sex or masturbation, too, but I digress.

That bliss was also so all-encompassing, I was certain, because it was the first time I’d had the chance to learn that I could be completely happy all by myself. All the happiness I needed was waiting inside of me and I didn’t need a man to unlock it.

That awareness has brought me an enduring joy (that I refuse to suppress!) that far outlasted the trip. It has lasted me the whole year. And I made a bet that it would.

**During the colossal heartbreak of 2022, I started taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin. It worked wonders for me. I will be happy to elaborate on that with anyone who asks. There is no shame in needing that kind of help. When I started the medicine, in August 2022, I told my doctor I didn’t want to be on this for the rest of my life and that I didn’t think I’d need to be either. He agreed and promised to help me and support me in going off of it whenever I was ready.

Taking that pill every morning in Thailand and Vietnam eventually started to feel silly. Come on, I was on top of the world! So I wondered if it might be time to taper off. But I’m no dummy. I had to ask myself, is it this trip that’s got you feeling so great or is it these pills? Will you still be the happiest you’ve ever been in your whole life when you stop taking the pills? And if it’s the travel that’s got you so high, won’t you crash as soon as you get home?

As unlikely as it might have seemed, I decided that I really was just this happy and that I was going to stay this way. Halfway through my 10-week trip, at the bathroom sink of my hotel room in Central Vietnam, I decided to skip my pill that day. As my doctor directed, I dropped down to a pill every other day, then every third day, then every fourth, then once a week, until I took my last pill in Japan, the last week of my trip.

I still felt great, but the true test would be when I was both back to my old mundane life in Atlanta and also no longer taking happy pills.

When I first got home, in July, every time I reunited with people I hadn’t seen in 2.5 months – my family, my girlfriends, my running group, work colleagues – they all said the same thing. “You look different.” “You’re glowing.” “I’ve never seen you so happy.” And I’d respond honestly, “I am different.” “Yes, I think you’re right.” “I’ve never been so happy.”

Now, six months later, on the last day of 2023, the tan from Vietnam’s perpetual June sun has worn off, but, whether or not others can still see it, I do still feel the glow. That somehow didn’t fade. Nor did the newfound certainty that I am courageous and capable and that the source of my happiness was always inside me.