August has a way of asking us whether we’re happy. Perhaps it’s the holidays, the long evenings or the endless photographs of people making memories in the sunshine. There seems to be an unspoken expectation that this is the season to enjoy ourselves, to make the most of life and, somehow, to have the evidence to prove it.

I’ve been wondering recently whether that question has become too small.

Not because happiness doesn’t matter, but because I’m no longer sure it is the feeling I’ve been searching for.

People have been telling me to “cheer up” for as long as I can remember. Friends, colleagues and complete strangers have all assumed that my face is a reliable guide to how I’m feeling. The strange thing is that they’ve often said it when I was perfectly content. My facial expressions and tone don’t naturally communicate happiness in the way people expect them to. I can smile, laugh and show enthusiasm, of course, but much of the time my inner experience simply isn’t reflected in my expression.

It has left me wondering how often we confuse the performance of happiness with happiness itself.

If I think about the moments that bring me the greatest sense of wellbeing, they probably wouldn’t look particularly remarkable to somebody else.

My perfect Saturday starts with my cats insisting it’s breakfast time long before I’m quite ready to get up. As they gather around their bowls, I put on Everybody Wants to Be a Cat from the old Disney film. It’s become our little breakfast ritual. I suspect the cats couldn’t care less about the music, but it makes me smile every single time.

The day unfolds gently after that. Breakfast in bed while watching the news, the washing on the line, a tidy house, a candle lit for no reason other than I like it, perhaps coffee or breakfast with my boys if they’re awake, and then hours disappearing into a good book until dusk begins to settle. There might be a simple dinner, a bath and a film before bed.

Nothing extraordinary happens.

If I posted photographs of that day online, I doubt anyone would describe it as exciting. There are no achievements to celebrate, no dramatic stories to tell and nothing that would make an interesting social media post.

Yet when I stop and notice how I feel, I realise the word I’m looking for isn’t happiness.

It’s peace.

For a long time, I think I overlooked moments like these because they didn’t resemble the happiness I thought I was supposed to be aiming for. They weren’t adventurous enough. Productive enough. Social enough. Looking back, I wonder whether I was measuring my life against somebody else’s definition of what a good life should look like.

I don’t think this is only a neurodivergent experience. Most of us inherit ideas about happiness long before we’re old enough to question them. They come from our families, our friendships, our cultures and the quieter messages we absorb about what success, fulfilment and even love are supposed to look like. Sometimes those ideas fit us beautifully. Sometimes they don’t.

For many neurodivergent people, though, that mismatch can feel particularly painful. If your nervous system finds peace in predictability, familiar routines, solitude or becoming completely absorbed in something you love, it can be easy to wonder whether you’re somehow doing life “wrong” when the world seems to celebrate something louder. The difficulty isn’t that those quieter moments are less meaningful. It’s that they’re often less recognised.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons so many neurodivergent people spend years trying to fit into lives that look right from the outside but never quite feel right on the inside. We become very good at measuring ourselves against expectations that were never designed with us in mind. We learn to perform happiness in ways that make sense to other people, while quietly losing sight of what genuinely brings us peace.

As a systemic psychotherapist, I find myself increasingly interested in these inherited ideas. The stories we carry about what a successful life should look like. The beliefs we have about relationships, work, family and ourselves. They rarely begin with us. They are shaped by the families we grow up in, the communities around us and the wider culture we live within. Therapy doesn’t offer a different set of rules to replace them. Instead, it offers the opportunity to become curious about where those ideas came from and whether they still fit the person you’ve become.

One of the privileges of therapy is that it creates space to ask questions we rarely pause to consider. Not, “How do I become happier?” but, “Whose definition of happiness have I been carrying?” Sometimes the answers are surprisingly freeing. Sometimes we discover that we’ve been chasing a version of fulfilment that belonged to somebody else all along.

As I’ve got older, I’ve become less interested in asking whether I’m happy enough.

I’m much more interested in whether my life contains enough moments of peace. The kind that arrives unexpectedly when a familiar song is playing while the cats eat their breakfast. When the washing is drying in the garden, a book is waiting to be picked up, and the people I love know exactly where to find me.

Perhaps happiness isn’t always something we need to chase.

Perhaps, sometimes, it quietly appears when our lives become recognisable to ourselves.