What Happens in Unhappiness...

Bad news: my novel edits are on hold as my Saturday is filled with other, more important obligations.

Good news: a few days off work and trying to keep my mind off other things has allowed me to turn quite a few drafts into future posts. Back to work I go today, and I'm hoping I can keep focused!  

Bear with me for a moment.

I’m in the process of cleaning up and posting drafts from the last few months - here and on social. Writing blogs had to take a back seat while I finished my novel, but now I finally get to return to these half-formed thoughts and give them the space they deserve.

Recently, I came across a quote that stopped me in my tracks:

“Have you ever paused to think that maybe the real reason you might be unhappy is because, deep down, this entire time you’ve been secretly trying to satisfy the world instead of yourself?”

I couldn’t shake it.

I think so many of us - especially women - get caught in the cycle of trying to be everything to everyone. The perfect mom. The perfect friend. The perfect partner. We chase an idea of “perfect” that the world hands us, and we exhaust ourselves trying to live up to it.

The other night, I was talking to my kiddo about happiness and protecting your peace. About how people come and go in our lives. How friendships and relationships shift and evolve. And how, through all of it, you still have to find your peace. Your joy. Your center.

That conversation stayed with me - because I realized I haven’t been doing that for myself.

Then I came across this Tik-Tok video (don't laugh, it's Matthew McConaughey) that talks about chasing joy and not happiness: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThgCoQCj/

My days are so focused on keeping everything moving and everyone okay that I’ve quietly stopped checking in with myself. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a crisis way. Just in the slow, subtle way that happens when responsibility becomes routine.

I think my best friend said it best: "Sometimes, I am just so tired and overwhelmed and I need life to cut me a break."

I’m not depressed. But I do feel stuck.

Like I’m running in place - maintaining, managing, holding everything together - while the world keeps moving forward. I know I’m not deeply unhappy, but I also know I’m not fully happy either. And admitting that feels harder than it should.

There are things I love with my whole heart - being a mom most of all. And yet, so much of the rest of life feels like repetition. The same routines. The same obligations. The same cycles of work, bills, planning, smiling, doing.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I laugh. I show up. I do what needs to be done. But do those things automatically equal happiness?

Because at the end of the day, I don’t always feel fulfilled by them.

And I think this is the part we don’t talk about enough: that it’s possible to love your life and still feel like something is missing. That gratitude and dissatisfaction can exist in the same breath. That admitting you’re not happy all the time doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful or selfish or failing the people you love.

Sometimes it just means you’re honest.

Growing up, I was always chasing greener pastures - but this feels different. I don’t want more. I don’t want bigger or shinier or louder. I want peace. I want alignment. I want that quiet feeling of not having to perform for the world anymore - of just being myself and knowing that’s enough.

And it’s not that I don’t love my life. I do. Truly.

I just sometimes miss the dreams I once held. And I think it’s okay to name that. To sit with it. To let yourself feel a little unhappy without rushing to fix it or explain it away.

Maybe unhappiness isn’t something to avoid - but something to listen to. Maybe letting ourselves feel it fully is what makes room for real joy when it finds us again.

So I’m sitting with this question - not in panic, not in despair, just in honesty:

What do you do when life is good… but something still feels unfinished?