I had a friend once.

Her name was Diana Krasteva, and she was one of the best people I have ever known.

She used to tell me that I only called her when I was sad. And, if I am being honest, that was mostly true.

I didn’t understand it at the time.

Back then, I think I believed the world owed me happiness. Not consciously, perhaps. I would never have said it out loud. But somewhere deep inside, I believed that life was supposed to be fair, that good things were supposed to happen to good people, and that when something bad happened, it was only temporary.

I needed someone to tell me that.

I needed someone to tell me that things would get better. That I deserved to be happy. That whatever was hurting at that particular moment would eventually pass.

Diana was often that person.

She died five years ago.

And sometime after that, I learned something I wish I had understood much earlier: the world doesn’t really care about my happiness.

It doesn’t care about yours, either.

That might sound depressing. It isn’t.

Actually, I found it strangely liberating.

Because if the world isn’t responsible for making me happy, then it isn’t responsible for taking my happiness away either.

There is no cosmic account where someone else gets to withdraw from my happiness whenever they feel like it. No committee deciding whether I have earned another good day. No person, circumstance, failure, disappointment, or bad news that automatically gets to own what happens inside my head.

My happiness is my responsibility.

And that means it is also mine to protect.

I’ve spent the last year trying to do exactly that.

Not by pretending that everything is wonderful. It isn’t.

Not by convincing myself that bad things don’t happen. They do.

And certainly not by becoming indifferent.

I still get angry. I still get disappointed. I still have terrible days. People still let me down. Life still finds ways to be unfair, sometimes spectacularly so.

But I’ve stopped handing over the keys.

I don’t want to spend my time explaining to the world why I am unhappy. I don’t want every disappointment to become a public trial, and I don’t want every person who hurts me to become the author of my story.

Instead, I want to notice the things that make me happy.

And there are so many of them.

Some are enormous. Some are ridiculously small.

A good conversation. A stupid joke. A song I haven’t heard in years. A quiet morning. A cup of coffee. Something my daughter says that makes absolutely no sense and somehow makes perfect sense at the same time. The feeling of coming home. A beautiful sentence. A memory that suddenly appears for no reason.

Small things.

But they count.

Every single day, every single hour, there is some little piece of happiness somewhere next to me.

And nobody can take all of it.

They can take some.

Life can take some.

I can lose things. People can leave. Plans can fail. The world can be cruel.

But they can’t take all of it.

And that is enough.

So this blog is going to be about that.

My happiness.

Not because I have figured life out. I haven’t.

Not because I intend to write some motivational manifesto about how everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe that.

Sometimes terrible things happen for no good reason at all.

But good things happen too.

And I want to pay attention to them.

Maybe this blog will find readers. Maybe it won’t. I haven’t figured out how to make people read it, and honestly, I’m not sure I care very much yet.

For now, writing it is enough.

It is a diary that is both open and closed at the same time. A place where I can put things into words and leave them here, accessible to anyone who happens to find them, but somehow still protected behind the wonderfully useful veil of my unpopularity.

Maybe someday someone will read these words and recognise something of themselves in them.

Maybe nobody will.

Either way, I will have written them.

And that, today, makes me happy.

So…

Dear Diary,

Today I was happy that I started you.