Thanks for reading I Am Happy. It’s been a journey over the last 9 months of discovering this platform and understanding what this publication wanted to be. So, as we’re entering a brand new calendar year, this felt like a good time to tell you what I’ve learned and redefine exactly what it is I’m doing here so you know what you can expect in 2024.
I am so ready for the new year.
I’m not sure where this has come from, this sudden urge to fling aside 2023 and dive into 2024. I’ve already taken the Christmas decorations down - something I don’t normally do until the traditional Twelfth Night. Usually I enjoy spending the early days of January surrounded by colour and sparkle, and maintaining the sense of celebration. But this year, something came over me. I woke up on the morning of 2nd January ready to clear it all away. Not because I didn’t like it, and not because I was particularly keen to see the back of the year we’ve just left. 2023 wasn’t a bad year - in fact, a lot of good things happened. It was the year I secured a publishing deal and started writing my first book - the thing I’ve dreamed of since I first learned how to write words. It was also a year I had eight articles published in national newspapers (considering this is something I do in my very limited spare time, I feel extremely pleased with that!). It’s the year I finally took the Counselling course I’d been wanting to study for years, and became certified in art and writing for wellbeing techniques. It’s the year I turned 40 - a milestone about which I’ve surprised myself with how excited I am. All in all, it’s been a successful one.
But it’s also been an extremely busy one. I have felt overloaded with the amount of things I’ve been trying to do, and, often, utterly exhausted. Between running a business, studying, writing a book, building a creative career and looking after two small children, I’ve felt like I’m holding more than I can realistically carry. Maybe that’s why the new, blank page of 2024 is so appealing. When I worked my way through my process for defining how I want to feel this year, the major theme that emerged was that I want a slower pace of life. I want to focus in on the things that truly matter, and set down the rest of the plates I’m spinning. I want to cut out the sense of busyness and move through life in a more intentional, present and connected manner. The word I landed on to guide my year is cultivation. Of my self, of the things that really matter to me, of a life that is lived in the here and now, not in an unreachable possible future.
I posted about this sudden urge to rip down the decorations on Notes, and
responded:This made me realise how much all the stuff of Christmas, all the clutter and visual noise, was contributing to my sense of overload. I felt so much calmer and more spacious once it all came down. This drive to clear it all away was a symptom of my nervous system crying out for a reset.
It’s time for a fresh, less cluttered, start.
What am I even doing here?
With that intention in mind, then, of focusing on the things that truly matter, I thought it was time to get my Substack house in order.
I started on this platform nine months ago, because my good friend
recommended it. I had gotten tired of shouting into the void of Instagram, but still wanted to write the kinds of musings I was posting there. Laionie had recently discovered and fallen in love with , and thought it might be a platform I would enjoy. She was right! (Thanks Laionie.) I immediately enjoyed the calmer pace, the longer-form and more thoughtful writing, the considered discussion and far more meaningful responses to posts (with none of the knee-jerk, polarised yelling of most social platforms). So I threw myself into it, without really knowing where any of it was going. Substack just gave me an outlet to empty my (often very crowded) brain. I gave myself up to seeing where it would take me and what this publication wanted to become. I am beyond grateful that so many of you have joined me on this journey.Now, as I close in on my tenth month, I feel like I have a clearer understanding of what I want to say and build here. I love
’s books and courses, and she speaks often of discovering “what wants to be written”. Sometimes it takes a while - you have to sit quietly and listen; you have to be patient while it reveals itself. I’m not great at patience, it’s never been one of my main qualities, but allowing the path to emerge, rather than trying to beat a way through, is something I’m learning to lean into. Giving myself the best part of a year to think about something is quite an achievement for me - maybe that’s my biggest achievement of 2023 - and I feel like I now know what wants to be written.I am happy
I started with I Am Happy as a title because my name, Allegra, means “happy” in Italian (my mother being half Italian). So, quite literally, I am Happy. Yet happiness has always felt to me to be something of an elusive and complicated subject. I’ve suffered with depression my whole life, and I recently discovered that I also have ADHD, which has certainly contributed to some of my mental health challenges (although I would argue that that’s in large part to do with how society treats neurodivergent individuals, rather than anything inherent in the experience of being neurodivergent, but that’s a rant for another day!). Happiness was a topic I was keen to explore.
The more I read, wrote and talked about happiness, the clearer it became that I was far from the only person wrestling with questions of what happiness really meant and how to get it. In a world where we have become increasingly distanced from our natural environment, our natural way of living, and from one another, many people are struggling with understanding what happiness really means to them, and with connecting to a sense of joy and fulfilment in the present moment. I think we need to do something about that.
I have long had, buzzing around the back of my brain, like a fly that simply refuses to fly out the open window that is right fricking there, the idea that I’d like to work in a therapeutic context. I’ve repeatedly flirted with the idea of training to be a therapist, but something always held me back. For one thing, I had therapy as a young teenager, and it was a disaster. I don’t want to put anyone off therapy, it’s incredibly valuable if you find the right kind, and the right therapist, for you, and we should all do more to care for our mental health. But my experience was terrible. The therapist kept leading me, often suggesting (to a vulnerable, imaginative child with holes in her memory) that certain horrific things might have happened to me. She had me convinced, for a little while, that they must have done and that I’d blanked them out, until I eventually realised she was full of shit. But that period of time of believing them obviously didn’t do my, already fragile, mental health much good. For another thing, talking therapy can involve a lot of time focusing on all the bad things that have happened to you, reliving them over and over, leaving you stuck in the worst elements of your past. Don’t get me wrong, it can be highly beneficial for some people if done right (i.e., not by the person I saw), but it wasn’t for me. Years later, I discovered coaching, and fell in love with the more forward-looking, goal-oriented approach. I loved it so much that I rushed off and got certified as a coach. I then had a major attack of imposter syndrome, and did nothing with that certification. Instead, I met my business partner and founded a diversity and inclusion consultancy. That awesome business partner is the person who has, since, been encouraging me to dust off my coaching certification and look again at how I can use it to help people in the way I had originally wanted to. How can I incorporate this work into the business I have, and make that business deliver the sense of true fulfilment I need? That’s a work in progress, but one that I’m excited about.
All of this led me to look at creative therapy. For me, creativity has been such a powerful tool to connect with myself and the world around me, and therefore to find my sense of joy. You don’t have to be a “creative” to use creativity as a tool for wellbeing - but then, I believe we’re all creatives at heart. Our species has been telling stories and making art since we began, and it’s the main way that we interpret the world. I think we’d all benefit a great deal from letting go of this idea that there are “creative types”, and then everyone else, and instead making creativity feel more accessible and free for everyone. Having leaned into this idea, and realised how important it was to me, I started to study creative wellbeing techniques, and become certified in various creative wellness practices. Then, finally, I got over myself and enrolled in the Counselling course I’d always considered taking, so I could have the grounding in more traditional therapeutic theories to help me understand where I wanted to take a wellbeing practice. (It helped, considerably, that I got a funded place to study this, as education, and any kind of retraining, is bloody expensive, making it inaccessible to many. I’m grateful to the Universe for throwing me a financial bone there. But maybe that’s a sign that it was meant to be.)
That’s where I’ve landed with my purpose - to help others utilise creativity as a tool for wellbeing, and work with people who are feeling as lost and disconnected as I have been so that they can find their personal happy.
So that’s my mission and my goal for this platform - to be a space where everyone can tune into their sense of what happiness means, and learn how to create it in their lives. To offer up tools and resources to guide you in using creativity as a wellness tool, to support your mental wellbeing and enable you to discover and express yourself. And to build a community where we can give each other the feelings of connection and collaboration that are so essential to happiness.
Who’s with me?
My publishing schedule is going to stay pretty much the same, but the focus will be a little tighter:
Wednesdays - posts exploring the nature of happiness, the ways we lose it and what we can do to find it again
Saturdays - guides to using creativity as a wellbeing tool, with practical resources available exclusively to paid subscribers
Monthly - guided workshops / recordings taking you through coaching and/or creative wellbeing exercises for paid subscribers (if we get enough paid subscribers, I will start hosting these as live sessions for the paid community so that we can come together and work on the exercises collaboratively - stay tuned!)
Every full moon - a new Full Moon Tale, my original stories in the tradition of folk tales, because that’s my bit of creative self-expression for you to enjoy
You’re welcome to simply be here to enjoy my Wednesday musings and Full Moon Tales, but if you’d like to use this space to support your wellbeing and build a regular practice of self-discovery and self-expression, you can become a paid subscriber for just £5 per month or £50 for the whole year. I’d love to help you find your happy place in 2024.
So here it is, 2024. It’s a blank page, just waiting to be written on. And we can shape our story in any way we want to.
Wishing you a happy and heart-led year.
Allegra x
I’m so glad you’re here ♥️
I have been thinking that I need to be loose and let it flow. When I am nervous I am very formal. I have not allowed myself to be vulnerable here yet. It’s coming... I hope lol! Yes maybe a podcast feature or an expressive arts mash up. I have been buried deep in the mixed media realm at this time. And doodling I just signed up for a Substack in a 30 day challenge and I got so lost in the process last night!