Backwards

"Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder." - Thoreau.


I`ve worked my life backwards.

This is something I only realised last night when I was lying in bed, ruminating on my upcoming birthday. Next week I start the very end of my 20s, and so I treated myself to a little imaginary montage of the past decade: a montage that didn`t have a Rocky theme tune, but probably could have done if I hadn`t ben too lazy to get out of bed and turn iTunes on. And, as I was remembering - preparing myself to move forwards into my 29th year (every girl needs a good year of preparation at least before she hits 30: this is a medical fact) - I realised that I had done everything in exactly the wrong order. As if I had lived my life through a Looking Glass.

In my early twenties, I dated a very nice young man. He was intelligent, sensitive, artistic, supportive and absolutely in love with me. We were together for over three years, and eventually we got a flat in a nice part of Oxford and moved in together. At the age of twenty three, I couldn`t get a real job, but I had a real relationship: intense, deep and absolutely ingrained in me. We had a sofa. We had a blue kettle. We had a bright pink wall in our kitchen (okay, so that was me, but perhaps more specifically I had a boy who would let me paint a bright pink wall in our kitchen). He loved my parents; I loved his. He wrote songs for me and filled the bath for me when I was tired. I had moved to be with him (shocker), and we did everything together. We talked of marriage, babies; he had no interest in any other girl, and genuinely thought I was the world`s best catch. I was utterly set.

Until I woke up one morning and realised that I wasn`t happy, and that I couldn`t do it. That I had everything - the lovely boyfriend, the nice house, the trips to Ikea where he didn`t complain, the potential father for a whole bevvy of sweet, intelligent, probably ginger children - and it was all wrong. That what should make me happy inexplicably didn`t. So I ran away, broke his heart and he never spoke to me again. Which still haunts me, but I had no other choice: I had no idea where I was going, or what I wanted, or who I was, but it wasn`t that. It wasn`t her.

And I fell straight out of that relationship into a relationship with my new career, for a PR company in London. Without quite meaning to, I`d gotten myself a job, and I threw myself into it with all the passion of a girl who doesn`t know what she wants and wants to forget about it: working long hours, attending parties, dating really, really unsuitable men. Until I turned around two years later and realised I was on a ladder I had no interest in climbing, and that if I didn`t get off pretty quickly I was going to end up too high to come down again. So I jumped off into unemployment, and wrote a really, really bad book that never got published. I also applied for an international competition, got shortlisted and spent three months of my life running around to radio interviews and tv interviews and doing God Only Knows What for the sake of... something to do. Another direction to run in.

At which point I fell stupidly, insanely in love, moved to Japan and fell apart. Which was absolutely and utterly inevitable, in hindsight: had he not been a morally devoid robot, I was only held together with sellotape anyway. It was just a matter of time before something unstuck me.

My friends have all done it the sensible way. Been stupid in love and fallen apart in their early 20s (and perhaps made a bid or two for fame), gotten a career and worked their way up to a decent company, and then fallen in love again, moved in and bought a sofa. Marriage and babies and puppies and trips to Ikea are therefore the next step. Me: I`ve gone the opposite way. Started with the stability and abundant success, and spent ten years taking it all apart. Started with The Dream, and pulled at it and pulled at it until there was nothing left. Until I`m working abroad as an extremely overqualified TEFL teacher, living on my own in the middle of a rice field and surrounded by people who don`t speak the same language as me.

And I have never been happier.

That was what I realised last night. I had it all at the beginning, and I have spent my 20s reaching each dream goal and realising that it wasn`t what I wanted. And it has taken reaching them for me to realise that they couldn`t make me happy. My life - which up til now I have seen as a series of failures, and a series of me running away from responsibility - hasn`t been pointless: it has been driving me closer and closer to knowing who I am, and what I want. To knowing that, for good or bad, my path is different to the one I was expected to take. To realising that every single step I have taken has been a good one.

And no step towards happiness, I have finally realised, has been as pivotal as the one that hurt the most. The heartbreak that ripped me up exactly one year ago next week (he broke my heart on my birthday, which was sweet of him) was both inevitable and necessary: held together with bits of sticky plastic as I was, it was the only thing that allowed to break down and start again. The only thing strong enough to force me to revalue my life, and realise that I had to start from the beginning: to learn, from the very start, what I loved, and what I was good at, and who I was. To be somebody I understood. To learn how to be alone. To learn how to love that person without needing anybody else to love it for me.

I`ve done it. Slowly - so, so slowly - I have put myself together again: infinitely better than I was to start with. I have started from the beginning. I have let go of what I thought I wanted; started understanding the things that do actually make me happy. Freedom. Independence. Travel. Art. Writing. The things that make me me, and give my life a meaning.

And if I have been quiet for the last two weeks, it`s because I have been scared of rocking the bliss, and scared of announcing it. Scared of saying: I wake up every morning in a house I love, listening to music I love, drive a scooter I love through countryside I love, to a school I love, to play with children I love, and I see friends I love and write a book that I love more than all of it. And every week I speak to my family, and every day I make plans for a life that has no bounds, and no limits, and no restrictions. A life that is as free and as full as I want it to be. And it`s not Japan that has fixed that for me. It`s the me I have changed here.

Happiness cannot be chased. For the last ten years I have run after it so fiercely: chased the dreams I thought were meant for me, and been made so sad. And it was only when I was broken and had to start again that I realised it was there all along: in knowing who I am. For while I`m only at the beginning, I finally know how to find myself again the next time I get lost.

I`ve lived everything backwards, and I`m glad. Because I am here, and I am more me than I have ever been before. More me than I ever could have been, trapped in a house in a small town in England, or working my way up a career ladder in London, or living my life on the other side of a lens in Australia. More me, because I`m no longer even slightly scared of where my life is taking me, or what I`ll end up doing or being. Because it will all be great, as long as I have the courage to keep believing that it can be.

It has taken every single step to bring me here: to a place where I can be happy. It has taken every single step, and especially the ones that hurt.

While I didn`t use a Rocky theme tune, I could have done. Because the next time I slip down, I know it`s going to be a hell of a lot easier to pick myself back up again.

And that deserves some kind of music.