The Nest I Built

On figuring out happiness

Happiness isn’t a trophy you put on a shelf, or a state you finally reach and never leave. It isn’t the flat line of contentment we’re told to chase. Happiness, for me, is movement. It’s a state of well-being that hums and shifts, fragile and resilient all at once.

This has been hard won.

I grew up in chaos. My childhood was marked by empty cupboards and nights when the heat didn’t work. Housing was temporary, and my sense of safety—like the roof over my head—was always in question. When I think back, I remember the sound of arguments through thin walls, broken glass in my mother’s hair, the ache of wanting things I couldn’t have, the way hunger sharpens your edges.

But I also remember how, even then, wonder would find me.

I was the kid who could spend an hour watching ants carrying crumbs three times their size across a cracked sidewalk. I was the kid who picked up the smoothest stone or the most crooked stick and felt like I had found treasure. That instinct—to marvel—saved me.

I grew up, and I made a life for myself. Piece by piece, like building a nest from scraps.

I took myself on a backpacking trip to Asia, carrying only what I could fit on my back, learning to order food by pointing and smiling, sleeping in guesthouses where the air smelled like incense and frying garlic. I celebrated New Year’s on a beach in Chile, the sky exploding with fireworks, strangers passing around bottles of champagne, the ocean licking at our ankles.

I made piles of art—stacks of drawings and paintings, scraps of fabric stitched into something resembling beauty. I published two books. I found love. I had a bright, happy child, who laughs like the sound of water hitting rocks.

And I did all of this without anyone paying my bills, without a safety net to catch me. Every plane ticket, every tube of paint, every bag of groceries—I found a way to cover it. That self-reliance has shaped me, but it’s not where my happiness lives.

What I was blessed with was an ability to experience joy in the smallest of places.

This week, at a cabin, a hummingbird hovered three inches from my face, its wings a blur, its eyes sharp and curious. That’s happiness: that brief, unasked-for visitation.

Happiness is the urge to look up at the sky when it blooms pink at dusk, to follow the contrail of an airplane and wonder who is up there and where they’re going. It’s buying the bright orange bowl or the ridiculous patterned socks because they make me smile to myself.

I collect stones and pinecones and line them on my windowsill—a private museum of tiny wonders. Happiness is sitting at the base of a giant sequoia, pressing my back against its bark, feeling its age hum through me. It’s the warmth of my child’s hand in mine. The smell of coffee on a cold morning.

Ross Gay writes in The Book of Delights:

“Joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me… We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.”

I think about that a lot—that joy and sorrow are tangled together underground, their roots entwined. That happiness might sprout from grief, or that what I call happiness is really the noticing of the connection between it all.

Some people say happiness doesn’t exist, or that the pursuit of it is foolish. But I think the pursuit is the point. Every one of us, regardless of age, race, religion, or bank account, aches for it. We craft little strategies, bargain with ourselves, take detours and shortcuts and long, winding roads—all for the hope of reaching happiness.

For me, happiness isn’t an arrival. It’s a thousand small arrivals: a bird’s wings beating inches from my face, a child’s laugh splitting the air, the quiet knowledge that I built a life—messy and imperfect, but mine—that can hold all of it.