I am, generally speaking, very happy.
But there have been people in my life – there are still people in my life – who do not like to see me happy. That fact passed me by until recently. In the past, when these people have sabotaged my happiness in countless subtle ways, I have looked for the reason, and I have let it get complicated. I should have stopped at step one: They do not want to see me happy.
It may not even be that they don’t want me to be happy. They may be perfectly fine with that, in theory. As long as they don’t have to witness it. But when they see me happy, and strong, and myself, something in them lurches and they do not enjoy it. So they act to not have that happen again.
That is all I need to know.
If I’d understood that in the first place, I could have gracefully sidestepped many attempts to undermine me. But, instead, I got mired in trying to resolve the situation. Trying to find the win-win. Ending up, more often than not, as the loser.
From now on, if someone acts in a way that tells me they do not wish to see me happy, I will try my very hardest to stop there, smile, ask no more questions, and completely ignore their tainted contribution.