Sturdy is not happy. Sturdy is not healed. Sturdy is not the version of yourself you perform at dinner parties or describe to your therapist when you’re trying to sound like you’ve got it together.
Sturdy is what’s left after the performance stops.
I know when I first found it. I was sitting on the floor of my apartment after my marriage ended — the one with the empty chairs I couldn’t look at, where buying a single avocado made me cry because I didn’t know how to buy food for one person anymore. I wasn’t falling apart. I was just… there. Breathing. Not fixing anything. Not numbing anything.
That ugly, quiet, undramatic moment was the first real peace I’d felt in years.
Here’s what nobody tells you: sturdy happiness doesn’t feel like happiness at first. It feels like nothing. Like the absence of the thing you were chasing. And that absence — that weird, spacious, slightly terrifying nothing — is actually the ground everything else gets built on.
I have this friend. Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka. Five feet tall, maybe 105 pounds, been in robes since he was eleven. His name is Bhante Sujatha and he is the most simultaneously enlightening and infuriating person I’ve ever met. I’ve written books with him and about him — and my new book, I Love You, Keep Going, is largely his fault. He once told me — with the calm of someone who has never stress-eaten an entire pizza — that we spend our whole lives building houses on sand and then wondering why they keep washing away.
I told him that was easy to say when you own nothing and live in a temple.
He smiled. He always smiles. It’s the most aggravating thing about him.
But he wasn’t wrong.
And then I married a man who proved it in a way I never could have theorized my way to.
My husband Grant is a United States Marine. Combat veteran. Disabled in Iraq. He came home carrying things that don’t have names — things that live in the body, in the night, in the silence that falls over someone who has seen what human beings do to each other. He didn’t find sturdy happiness through a meditation retreat or a spiritual crisis in a nice apartment. He found it — is still finding it, we both are — through something slower and uglier. Through learning that peace is not the absence of what happened to you. It’s something you build in spite of it. Alongside it.
If sturdy happiness can exist inside what Grant carries, it can exist inside anything. That’s not a platitude. That’s something I get to witness every day.
So here’s my actual question for you:
What are you currently calling happiness that might actually just be relief? Relief from loneliness. From conflict. From the anxiety of not being enough. Relief that looks like success, or love, or a really good bottle of wine on a Tuesday night.
I’ve used all of it. I’m asking because there’s a difference — and knowing the difference changed everything.
Relief requires the thing that gives it to keep showing up. Sturdy happiness doesn’t require anything. It’s just there. Under the floor. Waiting for you to stop running long enough to feel it.
What does sturdy look like in your life right now — and what have you been calling happiness that might actually be something else?
Hit reply. I read every single one.
#iloveyoukeepgoing
Tyler
P.S. If this landed, send it to one person who needs it. That’s the only ask.