How many elephants does it take to be happy?

Any. Any number of elephants is what it takes to be happy.

Recently I’ve been receiving a lot of compliments and comments on things that aren’t my appearance. People has been telling me that I look good, that I’m more positive than they’ve ever seen me and most importantly: that I seem genuinely happy. And you know what? I think I am.

The people commenting range from my supervisors, my therapist, old friends and my family. But, it wasn’t until last night that I realised it myself. After a long week with not much sleep, a lot of marking and a reasonable amount of stress, having just finished a 12 hour day – I was keen to get home but I wasn’t overcome with frustration or needing three days to recharge or even being depressed. I was tired, sure, but also I was happy. Now I realise that I think happiness is finishing a huge, exhausting, trying day and still being content at the end of it and “love what you do everyday”/”do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” are becoming quite clear to me now.

In part, my happiness is years and year of working hard to overcome trauma and push myself to find happiness in what I do. But part of it is also acknowledging that every single day, I get to think about the truest loves of my life: elephants. Seeing videos and photos of them make my heart sore, being able to talk about them brings me pure joy and having them on my mind constantly drives me. The worst part of the last few weeks has been climate anxiety – everything seems like it’s too late, like what I’m doing is too late. But I have elephants to ground me again.

Having said that, happiness is still so new to me that it feels fragile. Like it’s a sapling and anything could come along and trample it, but each day that it stays safe is another day that it grows and grows, alongside my love for what I do.

I don’t think there’s much point to this blog, but if things do become bad again or something happens – I want to be able to look back on this part of my life and strive towards it again. It’s also so hard to be retrospective to see how far you’ve come when you live in your own mind everyday so being able to track rises and falls is so invaluable.

All I can hope is that at the end of every day for the rest of my life, there are elephants.