‘Happiness found her like a train on a track,” sings Florence Welch in Dog Days. When I first heard that song, it hit me with the force of a railway engine, the shock of recognition. Happiness found me late. Until my early 20s, misery was my guide, and when happiness became my companion, I distrusted it. For years, I watched it carefully, sure it would abandon me and return my life to its natural state, the state I’d wrenched myself out of. I have had a complicated relationship with happiness. I was unhappy until I was in my mid-20s. I was unhappy when I was thin and when I was not. I was unhappy in love and out of love, when I was performing and when a contract ended. There were two places I could rely on for happiness to turn up: when I was dancing, an endorphin-rich state of joy always resulted, and when I started to write. That’s when happiness moved its bags in properly. I was 25 when my first play was produced by a theatre company I’d long wanted to be part of – but it was the work itself that granted happiness. Sitting alone with my fingers on keys, the scrape of pen on paper, waking in the dark to reach for the words that came to me in sleep. This was bliss. Once, when my children were young, I sat in the sun with a friend in my garden in Oxford. I lived in a house in a beautiful city, provided by a fancy educational establishment, I had childcare paid for by the Royal Literary Fund, I was married to someone I adored. My life brimmed with happiness, but I could not completely trust it. To my friend, I said: “When I am too happy, I feel sure that the universe will take it from me, that I will have to pay.” Honestly, I thought my friend would laugh with recognition – surely everyone felt this? Instead, she responded with mystified pity. About three years ago I realised that I had lived with happiness for more years than I had lived without it. Perhaps, I thought, it was time to accept that it lived with me now. That I had earned it. That it wouldn’t abandon me. And then – well, we all know what happened then. The pandemic reminded me of how little is in my control, that’s what happened. At first, it was a delight. Quiet! Reading! City walks! What were people complaining about? I returned to the love of my adolescence – roller dance, this time without the little dresses. The body has always restored me to happiness. Being able to dance, to walk, to kayak, practise yoga. I am ashamed to say I have taken for granted these pleasures. In lockdown each day, with the Black Pumas in my ears and my quads on my feet, I dipped and weaved at my local skate park; and each time I laced up my skates, I was happy. Then, earlier this year, a series of injuries meant that those pleasures became unavailable to me. The simple happiness reset of moving my body, the habit which I had relied upon, was removed and I was frequently miserable. As a result, I have had to revisit the question I had thought was simple: what does make me happy? I tried to seek it out, digging for it, running at it. Those first moments of returning to the theatre or to concerts as an audience member: bliss. Ah, yes, I thought, this is where happiness is. Or those other moments of intense happiness: my children returning from university and from their post-Covid travels; dinners with friends; laughing with my beloved partner. But it was slippery, falling from my grasp when I sought it out too forcefully. I began writing this in a cafe in a shady square in the Spanish sunshine. I thought that my response would be a simple one: speaking Spanish makes me happy. Being in Spain makes me happy. No, I thought: learning things makes me happy. I am happy when I am learning to sail, or to climb, or to dance. I am happy when I am striving. As soon as my hands started moving across the keyboard, there it was, like a train on a track. Happiness. Ah, I thought. It’s work that makes me happy. Purpose. Context. But then, when I tried to replicate it, like an engine whooshing past, it was gone. In fact, I was looking in the wrong place, or in the wrong way. All those years that happiness sat alongside me, while I distrusted it, my focus was on the people I loved, or the music in my ears, or the words falling on to the page. It turns out that for me, and perhaps for you, running at happiness is a bit like running at a rainbow. You have to squint at it sideways, find it as a by-product that arrives when we are focused on something else: learning, doing, connecting. And then, there it is, a happy accident, shimmering by your side.