Are you happy?

I just got a mail from an old friend asking me if I was happy. It was not an easy question to answer. I don’t think my reply was completely correct either. So I started thinking about my life and wondered why I was not happy. I am not unhappy but a lack of unhappiness does not mean the presence of happiness. There are many things in my life that other people would covet. I have a beautiful family, a nice house (yeah now after I have slaved for months living through painting jobs and improvement projects!!), a husband who has probably never looked at another woman (:-)), a reasonably good figure (you try giving birth to two kids and we’ll see how you look!) and on occasion a tendency to be rather humorous. So why am I not happy?

I think it’s because I have nothing (excepting some land and half my house – not bad actually!) to my name - neither money nor fame nor even a simple thing such as a car. What I have is what has been given to me – I have earned none of it. I have a bit of money saved up from my previous job but it’s not like I can do anything with that. I have started a software company because they needed someone to sign the papers and my husband always wanted to do something on his own. He is very talented and a great leader so I have no doubt that he’ll be successful and make tons of money as well. But I have no part in that either. True I gave up my job in order to sign the papers. But it could’ve been anyone else’s name – that won’t make or break the company. I am the Director but that doesn’t mean anything. I will not have a job to do and the rest of the people who are part of the company all know each other and respect each other so I would be the only outsider. While I think I could man the phones, the CEO’s wife will not be allowed to do that I think. So I am without any income and worse, after years of staying at home, I have ensured that my earning power will be real low even assuming I do go and get another job.

It is hard to be happy when you feel that in the past ten years what you have done could have been done by anyone else – it didn’t require much talent to get pregnant or deliver the kids. It didn’t take much talent to run a house. It did take talent to raise the kids but I rather screwed that up with my son. It did take a deal of talent to get my graduate and post-graduate degrees though but not using that has eroded its value and mine. So yes I get into a depression now and again at thought of what might have been and the frustration of not being able to get all the words in my head out. I want to write so badly but whatever is in my mind cannot find its way out. Where are the characters, the plots and sub-plots, the descriptions of human follies that are seething in my brain but vanish when I try to pin them down? I picture myself as being happy when I get my book out hoping someone would read it. I cannot picture myself being happy as a software engineer or as a director in someone else’s company who is tolerated because she is the boss’s wife. I am in short unhappy because I have earned no happiness yet. Maybe the best is yet to come but the waiting is not easy.