“Describe the happiest day of your life,” asks Bloganuary.

Oooh, this is a tough one, especially since there are so many options. Ever since I started practicing gratitude in 2023 (this needs a post of its own), I have been rediscovering the joys in my life and realizing that I have too many things to be thankful for or be happy about. It is really hard to pick one – so I’ll briefly touch upon two.

A close contender for the happiest day of my life is a particular day in early 2016. I woke up early that morning to a ping early in the morning, a message I had been expecting for the past few weeks. I woke up dreaming of getting that ping, only to wake up and see an actual notification of that ping in my phone. I fire up my computer, and reply to the message, starting a conversation with the other person.

The conversation goes on – it gains momentum, I’m at my most excited self, answering all the questions that are coming to me. I sense a feverish pitch. Finally, two hours later, the sun is up, my conversation has wrapped-up, and I am on top of the world. I jump with joy, run to my wife, wake her up from her sleep, hug her tight, and cry… with joy.

That ping on the wee hours of winter 2016 was from a certain Mister Matthew Mullenweg; it was my final interview with Automattic, and it culminated with me getting an offer to work full-time at the company. It was a dream come true, and sometimes I still pinch myself to check if this is real. My life changed that day for the better, and in many ways, what I have today feels like a dream, I have no other words for it.

So what is the happiest day of my life, you ask. Well, I’ll have to be a bit corny to answer that, but there’s a lot of things about that day which I’ll keep to myself. But I can be brief – it was the day I got married to the love of my life, which, truly was the beginning of my life’s turning point towards the better. 🙂