Letter from a fellow optimist: Kate Happle on how to be happy(ish) every day.
A love story about coffee and missed opportunity.
Hi fellow optimist-in-progress,
Welcome to Letter from a Fellow Optimist, where I hand the mic to another hopeful human.
Today’s letter comes from Kate Happle. I first came across Kate not long after she joined Substack, when she burst onto the scene with a viral note about confessing to her husband that she’d been secretly writing here. I was instantly charmed by her frankness, wicked humour, and clear-eyed sense of purpose as a writer.
As she puts it: “Life in the messy middle is really f*cking hard sometimes. It’s beauty and hope and chaos, but often it’s just bloody exhausting.”
(Yes, there will be swearing in Kate’s letter—consider yourself warned!)
Kate writes candidly about navigating life in her 40s: a late ADHD diagnosis, a midlife career change, and the rollercoaster that is early peri-menopause.
I asked her to share something honest about her relationship with trying—and, as always, she’s delivered a piece that perfectly captures both the humour and the frustration of being human.
Please join me in giving Kate a very warm welcome!
Hello fellow optimist(ish),
What’s your favourite time of day?
Sorry to launch right in! I’m incredibly introverted and, to be honest, terrible at small talk. Catch me at a drinks reception, and I’ll have you talking about some of your deepest experiences within minutes, if only to avoid having to discuss the weather.
Anyway…
If you were to ask me what my favourite time of day is (let’s be honest, I’m not the most consistent of people), I would usually say my morning coffee.
I can’t claim it to be a perfect daily ritual, or an exact science. But almost every day, I sit down in the morning before the day kicks off and have a coffee. Long, double-shot, with cream and vanilla syrup—thanks for asking!
To me, it is heaven. Yet despite it being my favourite time of day, I don’t always take a moment to reflect on it as such. You know… whilst it’s actually happening.
It might be because I’m stressed, short on time, or thinking about the day ahead. Maybe I get drawn into emails or Teams messages, or spend ten minutes happily chatting away with my husband and/or son. But as a result, I often fail to stop and notice the moment while it’s happening.
I fail to take in the luxuriousness of it all.
Fail to revel in that one consistent moment of joy.
And in reality, what is there beyond that moment?
The fact is, nothing outside of that moment exists. And nothing else needs to. It is complete. Perfectly formed. Ready and waiting for me to enjoy it. If I only take a second to stop and notice it.
And what is happiness, really, if not just a series of these moments?
Watering the garden in the setting sun at the end of a warm day.
Sneaking a chunk of chocolate from the bar in the fridge (yes, the fridge, I said what I said and I refuse to apologise!).
That first sip of a cold beverage as you sink into the couch in the evening.
Giggling with a loved one over a silly in-joke—one that only makes sense because of your shared sense of humour.
I could go on and on.
But if we’re being honest, a lot of our day is made up of shit moments, too. Moments of stress, and worry, and rush, and forgetting, and remembering what you forgot(!), and feeling pissed off, and frustrated, and giving no fucks, and giving too many fucks, and generally just—fuck!
Sour notes to complement the sweet.
Life’s perfect design(ish).
They say that joy is the journey, not the destination, and it’s true.
But only if you take your eye off the sat nav, park your concerns about the fuel level, ignore the niggle in your back from the seat, block out the sound of the squabbling children and take a moment to appreciate the view from your window.
I honestly believe I know how to be happy every day. Heck, at times I’ve briefly lived it. But the greatest barrier is not holding on to happiness.
It’s remembering to look for it.
Remembering to take note of and appreciate each and every joyful moment I stumble across.
And until I master that, I suppose I’ll always only ever be happy(ish).
With love,
Kate Happle
Life in the Overlap.
A Few Questions for Kate
Has your relationship with optimism changed over time? How so?
For a long time, I felt like being an optimist was a good thing. The thing you should be. Pessimism, by extension, was bad. The thing you don’t want to be. You only need to lightly delve into the field of positive psychology to learn the virtues of optimism for better physical and mental health and a longer life. Yet…
Optimism is HARD.
I have lived my life as a highly sensitive and highly anxious person. I am very much a realist. But if I’m being honest with myself, when my brain stretches beyond reality, it tends to veer into catastrophe and worst-case scenarios. Now you understand my dilemma, because knowing what I know about optimism, in turn, leads very quickly to even more anxiety and pessimism. Not only do I struggle at times to be optimistic, but now I know pessimism is bad for me… as if I need more things to be anxious about.
OK, back to the question, because perhaps it’s not all doom and gloom after all (see I can be a little optimistic sometimes!). My relationship with optimism continues to change. I’ve realised that my views of optimism have at times been far too two-dimensional. There's plenty of stuff I’m naturally optimistic about, while there’s plenty more where my brain leans a little more towards the pessimistic side; that’s just how it’s wired. Sometimes our superpowers are also our kryptonite, right?!
However, I can still make a choice (when I remember) to lean into the optimism in the moment. To stop and smell the coffee, slow down and observe happiness in the every day. For me, choosing a moment of happiness is what keeps me optimistic. Because to make that choice is to believe that ultimately, no matter what’s going on in my head, life can be everything I want and need it to be.
What’s a question you’re still trying to answer?
For me, the eternal question has always been, ‘What do I want to do with this one precious life?’ (I’m stealing from the magnificent Mary Oliver, but what can we say, she nailed it.)
Between wrangling others’ intentions for me (which, as a people pleaser, has always been a lot of work) and my multi-dimensional, frequently opposing desires for myself, I’ve often felt totally lost as to how I want to best spend my limited and precious time on this planet.
The good news is that I’ve come a long way from the days when I used to sit and try to think up the answer. I’ve realised that the only way to move closer is through doing, not thinking.
However, it’s still something that plays on my mind regularly, pulling me in various directions. My hope is that, in time, I will become enough of an optimist to trust that it will all work itself out in the end.
In the meantime, I’ll just keep calm and keep drinking coffee.
I hope something in this letter found its way to you—I know I relate to the feeling of not being fully present in the moment. If you’d like to leave a note for Kate, please comment below—she’ll be reading!
You can find more of Kate’s work here.
Until next time,
Emma x
Oh, and please don’t forget to tap the 🧡 button on your way out.
(Unhearted posts are terribly draughty.)
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Wonderful post ☺️ I too love my morning coffee moment and I too, am trying to ‘be more present’ while I drink it 😅
It’s easier said than done, but I really love this attitude of making a choice and believing that life can be what we want it to be.
I’ve been guilty of feeling like matters were out of my hands in the past and that helped exactly NO ONE. 😅 But to assume a lack of choice and control over your happiness is the weirdly comforting, familiar and easier thing to do,
So yeah, I guess my point is - this optimism thing isn’t easy! But when you can anchor yourself back to the reminder that it’s a choice, I do find myself able to see things in a much happier light and I love it ☺️☺️
I like to consider myself a happyist - just glad that there is any water in the glass at all.