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It’s the 1st of February 2026 and my little castle of happiness has come crashing down hard and fast. Well, this year I had promised myself joy, happiness, and nothing short of that. I had created this beautiful bubble of happiness in which I had conveniently locked out anything that would inadvertently make me sad. I had a simple mantra: everything is fine… I’m happy.

But in the midst of my floating, cruising, if I may, my peaceful bubble was burst faster than the curtain in the temple split into two when Jesus cried Eloi.

My promise to myself to find joy and happiness, dearest gentle reader, is not tenable anymore. I am miserable to levels even incomprehensible to me. I have been awake since 3 a.m., thinking, pondering rather, and oh boy, tears have opened like the floodgates in Noah’s time, only now I don’t have an ark and the waves are tossing me up and down, side to side.

I am now starting to think that maybe I don’t deserve happiness, perhaps because of some ancient curse placed upon me. I do like to think that I’m a decent human being, not perfect per se, but very incapable of inflicting pain. So why does it feel like I am paying for karma that isn’t owed to me?

Grief is a strange thing. It makes a house full of people feel empty. Everyone is asleep or laughing in the living room or going about their day as though the world has not just ended, and yet you are there, carrying the ruins quietly in your chest. Life continues normally for everyone else while yours feels like it has paused mid-scene.

I am mastering the art of silent suffering. Crying in the bathroom with the shower running so no one hears the betrayal in your breathing. Letting the water hit your face so you can pretend, even to yourself, that these are not tears. Staring at your reflection in the mirror and wondering when exactly your eyes started looking older, redder, sadder, like you have seen something you cannot unsee. Then wiping your face, practicing a smile, and stepping out like an actor returning to stage.

“Everything is fine… I’m happy.”

The show must go on.

It is almost comical how you can laugh at jokes while feeling like a ghost attending your own life. There is something deeply lonely about suffering quietly in a crowded house, about wanting to scream and yet choosing to whisper.

For the longest time, I thought happiness meant building a perfect bubble where nothing bad could reach me. But maybe bubbles were never meant to last. Maybe they were always going to burst at the slightest touch. Perhaps real joy isn’t pretending everything is fine. Perhaps it is learning how to sit with the fact that everything is not fine and still choosing to wake up the next day.

Maybe being this soft, this breakable, this deeply feeling person is not a curse after all. Maybe it is simply what it means to be human.