In my diary I have recently begun to track my happiness level on a 5 star scale. And despite the fact that I have to accept that an intensive and immensely beneficial period of love for another girl is coming to an end and I still have not found out whatever the purpose of life could be, the monthly average is both high and trending upwards. I'm a believer in tracking things over time now, especially if you are prone to forgetting or not noticing them. If you would ask me about my own happiness my answer would be mainly determined by how i was feeling that day and then some extrapolation my brain would come up with. This extrapolation depends on your personality and also long term experience and in my case I will underestimate greatly how I actually felt. As a result I would often feel bad and even blame other people for that. It also helps make sense of extraordinary events that have the potential to upend all of your life as you know it. At some point I had to ask myself why I feel so much better in the presence of one person than the other. Going back to my diary of immediate thoughts and this record of my happiness I found that in one case I'm okay and I do mostly things I do not care about. In the other I would be ecstatic three out of four days, 5 stars, "top!" written next to the date on that particular page and I would mostly be doing things I like or that are new and exciting to me. My life is by no means bad, but it is markedly better by subjective experience in one case. This finding has given me a lot of confidence. In particular confidence in confrontations with myself. I don't like change until I enact it, to a certain degree I'm scared of the future because I comb through all the different possibilities and so have a tendency of remaining in the "okay" and "good enough" mindset. I'm talking about the imagined life with two different people of course. I could be endlessly thinking about how much has happened with each, how good each one was to me, what I owe to each, what exactly is wrong or could be better and not ever find a good solution because there is none. Relationships are complex and another person is always as much positive influence as compromise. But when it comes down to it, your aggregate feeling tends to different levels, things just happen differently and you feel slightly better day per day, which adds up. There is another reading to this though. I feel that my happiness level is where it used to be and it's trending upwards, because of the presence of both of these people and others in my life and while the exciting, movie worthy solution would have been to change everything selfishly in one dramatic breakup, the reality is this solution also works really well. Life just slowly reaches it's "good!" state by patiently working with what actually happens, instead of regretting all the dreams and hopes that didn't. The underlying force at work here is focus on one's self. The star system is just one of the dozens of ways I started caring for myself over the years. And the main effect that this uncertainty of feelings had on me, was to raise my self-esteem. In my relationship I took on a role very early on in live, unknowingly refusing many others and it turns out that this role is not the one I want to play. So out of politeness, out of consideration, out of love perhaps, certainly following my natural tendency to give more attention to others than to myself, I found myself at one point being severely disappointed in me and then defending the last bits of my what I recognized as myself against it's main aggressor: my gf. That's a dynamic than can happen with friends to, colleagues, bosses, any kind of relationship. You give yourself up until you hate yourself and the world for it. I had to fall in love with another woman, find my own friends, go traveling alone and set limits for attention and care I want to give at home in order to reconnect with my old self, which I had almost forgotten, and improve upon it. And it has positive repercussions not only on myself but also on my gf. The doubts are a part of it and actually a positive sign of freedom of choice, which gives actual weight to any decision taken afterwards. It proofs that a relationship is either beneficial for both participants as entire human beings or it isn't. One of the immediate effects of this personal story is my appreciation of small town life this year. I never wanted to live in a small town, I prefer cities. I also do not like feeling rooted in one place, not moving, always speaking the same language, small talk on the level of neighborhood disputes or rumors about whose wife slept with whose husband. But small town life has a lot of advantages too: cleanliness, high quality of life, access to nature, a general slowness to everything and time. People have time for eachother to build meaningful relationships. The things I like to do and my self image I alluded to earlier is actually perfectly described by two words: golden retriever. We all know that dog, happy, gentle, honest, runs up to everybody to say high, is all over instagram. I found out that this is who I want to be, with the exception of the latter point. As my self worth grew, I began to invite the world in. Smiling, chatting, asking questions, looking with curiosity and good intentions. When I had come to France to live with my gf, I adopted her way of seeing the world, which is actually her mother's way: everybody is a potential enemy, don't bother other people, don't be bothered. I was shy and my French wasn't good so I followed suit until I internalized that philosophy. Catastrophic results. I broke free and did it my way again, met a person who has built her personality on this paradigm and discovered that I'm actually enjoying giving and receiving attention and making contacts. So over the course of a couple of years, we became regulars at certain shops and events and started making aquaintances, friends and over the last year or so the effect snowballed, where we basically have something to do with somebody any day of the week. The relationships are not very deep, but at this point I think that's a personal choice. They are however warm and genuine and give a real feeling of belonging and community. This has never happened to me. It has also never happened to either my parents or those of my gf. In three generations on my side I've actually only seen one person, my uncle, having this kind of life. By some kind of miracle, people with whom I can also personally connect moved here recently. People who speak my languages or come from my countries, people with international experiences and a more geeky, positive or enterprising tendency that I value very highly. And that was the point where I started to feel really good in this small town.