i got an e-mail this afternoon from a friend. it was one of those messages i'm not sure how to take. at first, i saw a lot of curt facetiousness in the guise of sarcasm and an emoticon smiley-face with the tongue hanging out.

i read it several times, and the words stopped making sense, as did the sentiment with which the author put them together. and then they made too much sense. and then they made sense in ways in which i didn't originally think they made sense. and then they went back to not making any sense at all. i don't know if the message was meant to be angry or even sarcastic, or something else altogether. i don't know if i'm overanalyzing to the extreme or not reading between the lines enough. i haven't replied yet. i'm not sure if i will. i don't know what to say.

but it got me thinking about things. things i don't want to think about. things that upset me to think about. people sometimes dismiss me as being shy or having low self-esteem, neither of which i think is accurate. i will be the first one to admit, however, that i am a mess of insecurities, and right now, i think, i'm the most insecure i've ever been.

i've spent a lot of the recent months trying to figure out what would make me happy. but here's what i've realized in the past few days: happiness isn't this thing i'm going to find or just stumble onto one day, like a lost wallet or a misplaced sales receipt. i'm not going to look at happiness and say, "happiness! how great it is that we're finally together!" and i'm not going plop happiness in my pocket and become best friends with happiness and be happy forever and ever amen.

happiness is, at best, temporary. you only realize you've got it during a moment (i.e., "boy, i'm happy right now!") or, once in a blue moon, in retrospect (i.e., "boy, i never knew it at the time, but i sure was happy back then!"). right now, i am not happy. and so i will try to figure out the source of my unhappiness and eliminate it, thus making myself happy until the next time i am unhappy, and the procedure will then start all over again.

i'm not entirely sure how this e-mail touched on a nerve and why sent me into this complete and utter shame-spiral. but it did. this is something i must accept, deal with and move on.

in closing, i'd just like to say that one of the issues this e-mail addressed was why i keep a journal on the internet, since journals should be "kept private, otherwise they don't really serve their purpose (which is to write down private thoughts and work out private problems)." i figured it would be ideal to address this in my journal.

i do note "private thoughts and private problems" in private entries. however, most of my entries are public because i appreciate that friends choose to share in my written experiences. this journal exists because i enjoy writing for an audience. it's what i hope to do to make a living someday. "write what you know about," the old saying goes. what i know about -- or, at least, what i'm continually learning about -- is myself. and realizing that makes me ... happy.