The Happy Place Effect

Some books make you feel. Other books REALLY make you feel.

I had a bad week this week and to try to pull myself out of it, I picked up Happy Place by Emily Henry.

Happy Place was one of my favorite reads from 2023 and I’ve been wanting to reread it since. The story felt so real and raw and vivid and it really made me feel all the emotions last year. I knew that rereading it would elicit those same emotions and I hoped that it would help me to get my emotions flowing and get me back into my usual frame of mind.

And reading it this time… it REALLY got me thinking.

Firstly, what is my happy place? I have many things and many places that make me happy, but I don’t know if I know what MY Happy Place is yet. And I think that’s okay.

I spend a lot of time in my head. I grew up as an introverted only child, which means I grew accustomed to time spent in my own head. I know how to make myself happy, I know how to entertain myself on long bus rides, train rides, and flights, and I thrive being on my own.

But that’s not to say I always want to be on my own. Just because I’m good at it, doesn’t mean that I always want it. And the older I get, the more I realize that I actually might not be as good at it as I think I am. I crave relationships with others and I so deeply value the ones that I have. The people I surround myself with are people who I have chosen from the billions of people in this world to call mine. We share similar values, we have fun together, we can depend on each other.

I also crave a partnership with someone else. I love love, I am a romantic at heart, and I truly can’t wait for the day that I settle down with a man I love and we create a life together.

Now that I’m older, I find that when I fall into bad moods or bad frames of mind, I have a more difficult time pulling myself out of them than I did when I was young. When I was a kid, I feel like I could just flip a switch and my good mood was back. If that didn’t work, I listened to Chris Brochu’s music and my good mood came back swingin’. But now, it’s not that easy.

This week was one of those weeks. Out of nowhere, it felt like my world was crashing down and no matter how hard I tried to pull myself out, I sunk further and further down. I’ve noticed this happen in the last few months too and my new philosophy is this: don’t try to pull myself out.

This might not work for everybody, and I realize this, but the more that I try to pull myself out, the more pressure I put on myself to feel better, the WORSE I feel when I can’t do it. Having that amount of pressure on my shoulders sets me up to fail.

Instead, I let myself feel. I let the emotions course through me and I remind myself that they will pass. The desire for them to pass remains like it would in the previous scenario, but the pressure is alleviated and it allows for my emotions to pass more quickly.

Going about it in this way will sometimes allow me to sit up, look around me, and realize the emotions have passed without even having realized it.

But to circle back to my first point – about doing well on my own – I’m realizing that that also might be hurting my relationships.

I’ve been seeing someone for the last few months and if you’d asked me before I picked up Happy Place, I would have said that things are going great. I would have told you that he’s an amazing guy. He’s caring, he’s thoughtful, he’s supportive, he’s everything you’d want in a partner. But I would also say that we have a lot left to learn about each other. That there are a lot of conversations left for us to have, a lot of room for us to grow and decisions to be made about where we see our future going. If you’d asked me before I reread Happy Place, I’d have said I had no worries about those conversations.

But now, I’m feeling a little bit like I’m on shaky ground. It’s nothing that he’s done, it’s nothing that he’s said, it’s ALL in my own head.

Happy Place is about a woman named Harriet who has recently broken up with her ex-fiancé Wyn. Harriet and Wyn met through their close-knit friend group and had been together nearly a decade before breaking up. When the friends go on their annual vacation, Harriet and Wyn still haven’t told their friends they’ve broken up and the story explores the complexities of friendships, relationships, love, loss, growing up, and what it means to find your happy place.

It takes Harriet almost the entirety of the novel to see that she’s grown apart from her friends. To understand exactly why she and Wyn broke up. In the end, it boiled down to the fact that she was trying so hard to be the one who had it all together. To be the one who didn’t put a burden on her friends. To be the rock when Wyn couldn’t. When it came to the important things – like picking a wedding date and grieving – Harriet pushed it all away, to let everyone else feel their emotions. To be supportive, never needy. To be the chill one. To always be the one who was okay. To never ask things of other people.

I saw myself in her. I don’t think these are bad qualities, but I think the circumstances in which she was exhibiting these qualities is important and it stung a little bit, seeing myself in her. I don’t want to be that person. I loved Harriet; she was witty, she was kind, she was lovely, but these are qualities in her that I do not want to share under these circumstances.

I’ve had a little bit of a fear inside me these last few months that maybe he doesn’t know how much I care. I have worked so, very hard to be chill in this relationship. I have worked to be the go-with-the-flow type of girl, when I am, in fact, not that girl.

I desperately want to be that girl, so I’m not saying this so it seems that I’m giving him a false version of myself. It’s just that in the past, I have been the complete opposite. I have had the desire to hold control in any way I can. I have wanted to talk 24/7. I have wanted to be together 24/7. And I genuinely do not want that now. I want someone who I care about and who cares about me. Who wants to see me and spend time with me, but doesn’t need for it to be constant. Someone who can create a life with me while we both still maintain our own separate ones as well.

I am trying so hard to do this that I fear I may have missed the mark completely. In trying to change how I’ve behaved in the past, I fear that I could have hidden the fact that I really do care.

I try to allow plans to come up organically, I tend to let him ask me to hang out or let him pick what we do, and honestly, not only is that probably difficult for him, it also, in no way, shows that I care about those things too.

Even though I don’t want to be picking everything and planning everything, I think I should be showing a little bit more initiative as well.

I don’t want there to be a lapse in communication on my end like there was on Harriet’s. As much as I know I’m every bit deserving of hearing that I’m missed or that he wants to make plans, he deserves those things too. And I think a part of me knew this, deep down, before rereading Happy Place, but this book really drove the point home.

Ultimately, Happy Place did what I needed it to; it made me feel better. But it did something more too. The book made me see faults in myself that I want to change and improve upon. I want to go after what I want, not just let things happen to me.

So, I’ll end it with this, what is my Happy Place? I don’t know yet. But I do know that it’s not in my head. The contentment I can find in solitude is wonderful, but it is not my happy place.

My happy place is external; it’s a place where I can build my life with people, share my ideas with others, spread my love, build connections. Where is that place is exactly? I’m still trying to find it with and that is okay.