I have stopped asking myself if I am happy. Somewhere along the way, I decided that happiness was a secondary concern, something that mattered less than being reliable or good. I traded joy for utility so many times that I don’t really know what the point of any of this is anymore.

Most of my life feels like it has been spent holding other people together while I slowly unravel in the background. I am the one who rearranges, cancels, and makes room. I say it is fine when it is not. People call that kind, strong, and dependable. From the inside, however, it feels less like being a person and more like being part of the scenery. I am something that is just there so other people’s lives have a place to happen.

When I look back, I can trace the shape of my absence in my own life. There are jobs I never applied for because someone needed me close. There are trips I never booked because the timing was not right for everyone else. I quietly set aside things that made me feel briefly alive so I could show up for someone else’s emergency. Again and again, I chose the smaller version of my own life so others could expand inside theirs. They moved forward. I stayed still and called it responsibility.

The same pattern shows up in my friendships. There were people who once knew me honestly. We had late-night conversations and dumb jokes that hit exactly right. These were people who saw me before I smoothed myself into something safe and useful. Yet I let them drift. I left messages too long. I kept saying we should catch up but never followed through. There was no big fight. I simply did not show up, and eventually, they learned not to reach out.

So now there is a long list of “almosts.”

Almost took that job.
Almost went on that trip.
Almost said no without apologizing.
Almost kept that friend.
Almost let someone take care of me for once.
Almost became someone whose own needs counted.

And then there is you.

With you, things felt different. You knew how to read me before I said anything. You could tell from the way I walked into a room whether I was calm or coming apart. Being with you was the first time the future felt like something I might live inside rather than something I was just maintaining for other people. For a while, I believed I was not just background.

Then came the night where everything shifted.

We had been happy. We were existing in that easy, harmless way that makes you think nothing can really go wrong. You trusted that the ground beneath us was solid. It should have stayed that way.

But I crossed a line.

It was not a misunderstanding or an accident of circumstance. It was a conscious fracture, a moment where I let something break that I should have protected. I knew the weight of what I was doing, and I did it anyway. One decision, fully avoidable, that changed everything.

In the morning, the guilt was already there before I opened my eyes. It was heavy and solid. There was no space for pretending and no way to carry it quietly. I told you what I had done. I gave no excuses. I laid the truth out between us and admitted that I was the one who caused it.

You listened. You asked a few questions. You did not try to destroy me, nor did you turn away in anger. You said you saw that I was sorry. You said you loved me. You said you were willing to accept that people lose their way and that we could find a way to move forward.

That should have helped. It did not.

Your acceptance did not wash anything away. Instead, it pinned me to the betrayal. You saw what I was capable of doing to us, and you offered kindness. I was the one who could not stand that. I began to pull back in quieter ways. I gave shorter answers. I made less eye contact. I avoided your hand, not because I did not want you, but because I did not believe I deserved to be touched by someone I had hurt.

In the end, it was not the act itself that ended us. It was my guilt. You had found a way to live with the truth, but I was the one who could not. I let the distance grow until there was almost nothing left between us but the memory of what I had done and the way I kept stepping away from you afterward.

Now, when I think about you, I do not only remember the loss. I remember that you tried to stay in the reality of what happened, and I was the one who ran. I ended it twice. I did it first when I crossed that line, and then again in every small moment afterward when I chose my guilt over actually standing beside you as a whole person.

I stack that on top of everything else. The friendships I let die by inaction. The chances I walked away from before I could be rejected. The years spent being useful while my own life shrank around me.

I keep circling back to the start, to the question I stopped asking years ago.

Is happiness actually necessary?
Is it something a person can live without?

I tell myself people survive on less all the time. Maybe I do not need joy, deep connection, or a sense of belonging. Maybe it is enough to function. I can wake up, do what is expected, keep things from falling apart, and not scare anyone by letting them see how empty I feel.

So I start renaming things.
Numbness becomes stability.
Isolation becomes safety.
Giving up on myself becomes being realistic.

And then there are the late hours, when the lies stop working.

When it is almost morning and the sky is still dark, when the house is quiet and nothing is glowing but a streetlight, it all feels loud again. There is no one to check on, no messages to answer, and no tasks to hide inside. It is just me, awake at a time no one has asked me to be, sitting with the life I have actually built.

That is when the almosts show up. The people I let drift away. The chances I backed away from. You, willing to forgive the unforgivable, and me choosing to become a stranger because I couldn’t bear it.

I write this down because leaving it all in my head feels worse. Because seeing it in words makes it harder to pretend it is smaller than it is. Because I do not know what else to do with the ache of it.

I do not really know what I am continuing for. I just keep going. One more day. One more version of “I am fine.” One more quiet performance in a life that has never fully felt like it belonged to me at all.

And the cruelest truth is that seeing the pattern does not make me break it. Even after realizing all of this, I remain resigned to the fact that I will not stop. Tomorrow, I will still answer the phone. I will still rearrange my day to make room for someone else’s chaos. I will still offer myself up as the glue for everyone else’s broken parts, simply because being useful is the only way I know how to endure.

Under all of that, there is a small, tired thought I never say out loud.

That maybe I was never meant for anything as bright as happiness.
That maybe this careful, faded half-life is all I actually get.
That maybe, after everything I have broken, it is all I actually deserve.

And most days, it feels like the only real choice I have left is whether I keep pretending that is enough.

But if I spend the rest of my life shrinking to fit the space I believe I deserve, will there be anything left of me when I am done?