“Show me how and I will. I'll get outta here
I’ll start climbing up hill and get outta here
Someone tell me I still could get outta here
Someone tell Lady Luck that I’m stuck here...”
– Alan Menken, Skid Row
Happiness is one of those human concepts which we have, historically, struggled to define. The problem is that it’s one of those words which, like “justice”, “respect”, or that all-time favorite “fair”, means something different to everyone who thinks about it. We all have a pretty basic idea of what it is UNTIL we start to think about it.
To some, it means joy in the moment, no matter what. “She’s such a happy person, nothing ever gets her down”. For others it’s the fulfillment of dreams: “If I win the lottery, I can finally be happy”. Some like to find it in invented worlds, others in giving to the community. Some see it as the realization of all desires, others as the release of all desires. The truth is, there really is no such thing. Ha, you think, but I’ve BEEN happy myself, so I KNOW it’s real! Well, sure it is. But it’s a state of mind. One person can be, as the saying goes, happy as a pig in mud in a situation that’s making everyone around them miserable, or the other way around. It happens all the time. Happiness isn’t a thing, like a gall bladder, nor is it inherently “owed” to anyone or anything by the universe at large, any more than words like “deserve” can have real meaning outside social interactions.
I’m not going to try to go into the history and philosophy of what happiness “is” and how it’s been approached; for that I strongly recommend Derren Brown’s book "Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine”. Although the book is primarily a discussion of stoic thought and how that can aid in achieving personal happiness, it also neatly comprises a plethora of past human thinking on the subject and is an excellent primer. Nor am I going to try to sell you some secret or make any attempt to tell you how to improve yourself: if you think you need improving, that’s your business, by all means get at it. Although the self-help industry is huge, all it is is a vast collection of preachy opinions, after all, and it’s not my job to throw mine at you.
This blog is supposed to be about me, which makes me very uncomfortable because who am I? I’m just some random chick. But it says right in the intro that people have tried to get me to write down some of the stuff that goes through my head and inflict it upon the world, so that’s what I’m doing. Fight me.
I might be in an excellent position to try to quantify personal happiness, sort of, at least as far as it applies to me, because I have achieved all of my necessities and realized none of my dreams. I suppose I’m about to, in my irritatingly rambling way, give it a shot.
Am I happy? Absolutely! And not at all. Try that on for size.
I’ve had a hard life. I don’t really look at it that way but people talk to me for a while and then tell me that, so even though lots have had it way rougher, I guess I’ll take their word for it. I will certainly be the first to say there has never, not even once, been anything EASY about it. I’m incredibly proud of myself – and I’m a resounding failure. But that’s OK.
What on Earth am I talking about? Well, look. I Have what most of the population of the planet would call the good life, and I’m well aware of it. Our lives – my little nuclear family – have almost never been in more than routine danger (traffic, illness, the usual stuff) since my kid’s terrifying brush with death at 24 hours old and subsequent week in intensive care. We always have enough to eat. Even in the days a couple of decades ago when my husband and I had to sell our books or collect empty bottles in the park to get food, we always did get food. We have a secure roof above our heads, central heating, and the water that comes out of our taps is some of the cleanest in the world. We even have amazing communication and entertainment options at the touch of a screen. Just today I exchanged greetings with friends and family on three continents and watched “How to Train your Dragon” and “House of 1,000 Corpses” (I’m eclectic) while I edited my photographs to share with, pretty literally, the whole world. All these things give me a sense of achievement, because even though I never got us farther than this, this is my doing. I did this: through sheer hard work, I kept us alive, and I brought us to this shore, where we have these things.
Even more than that, I have this us of which I speak. I am a part of a we, an element in a collective. My marriage hasn’t been strife-free, same as anyone else’s; it’s had its challenges from his side and oh yes, from mine, but one thing has never been in doubt: 27+ years ago I married the love of my life and he his, and it’s worth the work we’ve done to get through the rough patches, the attention we’ve paid to ourselves to adjust to things like the fact that we are VERY different people. And into this world we brought a child, now a teen; love tripled instead of doubled, more worthy work, more challenges needing to be met with the utmost care and compassion. And what a wonderful person this child is growing up to be.
Further still, I have mad skills. Art of various types sits so deeply in my genes that anywhere you look in my genealogy there are painters, cartographers, musicians, writers, sculptors, even a ventriloquist. I’m surprised and rather dismayed that I’m not per se musical; I can sing some, I can hear with perfect pitch, I love music – but I’m no performer, nor have I ever really been moved to be one, although I fiddled around with the trumpet for a while and took some musical theater classes. I’ve done some stage acting, 30+ years ago; even won an award at a festival once, when I was 17. I sculpt, in clay and stone, because working with my hands brings me peace. I tried bookbinding but I’m too sloppy at it, somehow; I’ll try again sometime. And so on.
I do art, thus, you get the picture. Something which has been able to sustain my sanity in times of trial (except two long periods of deepest pain when I couldn’t even sketch). I doodle on anything around me, I paint, sculpt, and write, I recently embraced my father’s main art of photography. I can also build a fire using natural materials, catch a fish, build a crate, hand-feed a baby macaw, groom a poodle, cool down, warm up, or jump a horse, perform CPR, cook well, build a shelter in the woods, change a baby’s diaper, put in a fence post, give a snake an injection, find a wild bee hive by smell (if I get close enough to notice it in the first place), build theater sets, bind a wound, paint a house, and so on. I enjoy learning new things, and more than that I see it as essential.
So yes, I’m happy. I’m more than happy, even, in these things: I am fulfilled. I can walk with pride, for many of the choices I’ve made and the things I’ve managed to keep close.
I’m also suffering. And I’m angry. And I’m literally crippled. My world is so much smaller now. And sometimes I'm feeling so blue I just sit around and cry. And that’s OK. With everything going on, it would be freakish if these things weren’t true. But – and here’s the key bit – it’s also a matter of choice. I’ve always been stoical by nature. I can’t go as far as some people and say that everything I can’t control is just fine, but what I do know is that what I cannot control is not worth my ACTIVE energy. A part of me will always be, if you will, fretting; I’m a sensitive person, I love everyone and everything unreservedly until it bites me and even then I feel compassion for whatever made it have to be that way. I care about everything. I worry. I find many things profoundly unfair, and at the moment even have two personal situations worthy of genuine rage. But that can’t consume my every waking thought or it will consume ME.
It’s much better, psychologically, to put those at the back, on auto-run programming, monitors barely in view, as it were. I could choose to try to stop caring, to be less bruised and confounded by worldly injustices and extinctions, attacks on people who aren’t “mine”, the continual erosion of all that I love, respect, treasure in the world. I could choose to avoid exposure to things that cause me stress, that cause me to spend my energies on transforming that stress and moving it aside. But I choose not to. I allow myself to still feel grief and anger about the removal of a 75-year-old juniper ecosystem from a garden near mine last year. I choose not to put climate change and those kids in ICE detention and the torture whales undergo from the current sonic state of the oceans completely out of my mind.
It's because I don’t WANT to. I don’t LIKE people who don’t care about that stuff, who don’t have empathy or understand respect, who feel so much more important, somehow, than the world that only what happens to them matters. Why would I strive to be like them, just for a little peace of mind?
But I DO have peace of mind, anyway. It's my most essential tool. Sometimes it’s very hard to find among all the unpeace, sometimes I lose it for a little while after a hostile situation or a loss or illness or just on a particularly low day, but it’s there. I keep it safe, somewhere inside, and when I can, I bring it to the front. If everything is terrible, how much more beautiful the sudden laughter of a child or a bright falling leaf against a steel sky, or a witnessed moment of kindness? How much more precious the smell of the first log fires of the year, wafting through the biting cold? I’m not saying I’m some inner peace master or some shit; I just try to see what there is to see. Just because that comes initially from my first decades of life being pervaded with threat doesn’t mean I don’t see the beauty too. And when you get right down to it, in the individual little moments, a lot more beauty than threat appears, even be it the rich earthy color of the dust on your feet, the brief smile of a stranger at some inner joke, your own enjoyment of something that happened long ago. It’s a way to stay calm, so you can think – or not, as you choose. Sometimes I need to just… be, especially in the sun, with the sounds of bees or birds or distant barking dogs
So I often get outwardly calmer under stress. People notice it and tell me things like I must have a good sense of humor, or I must be so strong, or whatever, because even on a worst of days, with pain levels such that I can barely walk and someone dear to me suffering things I shudder to think on, struggling home from a very long day through whipping sleet, I can smile when I see someone I know, and talk to them kindly, and laugh and even find delight in something immediately to hand. I don’t know if that means I’m strong though. I don’t know if that means I have such a great sense of humor or all that. What I do know is, it’s how I survive. I survive by, no matter how unhappy I am at any given time, being a basically happy person when you get right down to it. Or something like that I guess.
I’m also a very perverse person capable of taking some comfort in the bigger pictures. Since I was old enough to understand, for example, what mankind is doing to the ecosystem and other inhabitants of this world it has ripped my heart to shreds. It always will, and I’ll always do my best where and as I can to reverse it or at least support my local environment. I can take comfort, though, in the fact that historically, it’s only taken around 10,000 years for biodiversity to come back up to speed after a mass extinction, so once we’re out of the picture for better (space travel golden age, let’s all just get along, or so on) or worse (we annihilate ourselves in one toxic way or other), the planet will get its shit together pretty quickly, geologically speaking. Meaning we’re just a Very. Slow. Meteor. I try to stop myself before I expand mentally on this to the part where all of us and everything is just chemical processes and mineral accretions smeared across a void so nothing matters anyway... Although that’s true, it’s also true that I’m a discrete consciousness in a meat robot walking around caring about how awful bullfighting is and wondering why people are so hung up on who uses what bathroom and thinking about how awesome it would be if maybe we really did all try being nice to each other for fucking once. It is what it is.
I’ve always known, since I was a very small child, that there is one thing that any animal has to do in order to be able to do any of the rest of it, to be able to care or not care, help or hurt, empathize or ostracize, succeed or fail. That thing is survive. If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing anything at all, so it should be the first thing one looks to, and it should also be seen as an achievement in itself. And the more a person knows, about as wide a collection of different things as possible, the more one is equipped to survive in as wide a set of scenarios as possible… and the happier one can be. The more one can do, the more one can make for oneself, the more ways a person can look at something, the more enjoyment one can carve out of this brief spacetime event called life.
I’m fully aware, now that I’m at this end of all that, what a remarkably bleak jumping-off point that seems to be. It’s never felt that way to me, but I’m glad that my loved ones don’t have to be coming from this place. I disagree, though, that it is harmful in itself. It’s where I needed to be. I got into a heated exchange once with a psychologist, during a multidisciplinary rehab program about my spinal hernias, because she kept insisting that I would “be happier” as soon as I “stopped surviving and started living” and wouldn’t accept that it’s synonymous for me and that’s OK, or even that we might just be hung up on semantics and should maybe move on. But it’s exactly what’s kept me functioning through some of the greatest of the adversities, when moving my body was a matter of willpower over dead meat but more than one person depended for life itself on me carrying on, when my motto was that of the great Boxer the horse: “I will work harder”. If I had been unable to be in that place in my head, I guess I might have stopped, failed, failed others, died. But it’s not a place I want my loved ones to go, it’s not a healthy place. They shouldn’t have to know that territory.
I did go a little crazy. Anyone would have. At times over the most recent set of years that motto changed to “Happiness is Irrelevant” – but of course I only meant MY happiness. The happiness of my family was paramount. I recognized it, eventually, as a sick story. It was born out of the things that finally kicked my eternal resilience to the curb two years ago.
I never achieved a single one of my dreams (getting an advanced degree, making a basic living at something I really like, bringing something of joy or beauty or entertainment or even profundity to people on a wider scale than just my close circle of friends and family) and obviously, thus, not my fantasies (the Dream House, the trips to exotic wild locations, the library, a horse) so I had a PLAN instead, to take what I had and build something for us out of that. What I did achieve, you see, was an enjoyable enough, secure, public service job at a place I liked with people I could work well with. Part time. If I could get to full time, we wouldn’t have to depend on a government stipend or family handouts. We could even do things like see a movie or eat at a restaurant sometimes. I could stop cutting my own hair.
For nine years we lived repeatedly at this level, in the form of temporary full-time contracts for months at a time. It was sworn to me that full time work would be mine, permanently, when another person left someday. I took every extra shift, did every job nobody else wanted, put in endless free overtime, built a reputation as reliable, creative, the person to go to for an out-of-the-box solution or extra diligent attention to a tough or very long job or anything above and beyond. Let’s just sum the ending up by saying a petty bully waltzed in and created a hostile, unpredictable work environment, the other employee DID leave, my new boss kept me hanging about past promises until dashing them to nothing at the last possible second… In short, everything I had worked for for nine years was whipped away suddenly like a party trick.
I was already exhausted, I was already many years into my chronic pain situation, blah blah blah. While I worked off the last months of her predecessor’s full-time contract with me, I also worked full time looking for other work… but for someone like me, there isn’t any right now. I burned out. EPICALLY. Two years of bureaucratic wrestling and stress, including an incident of bullying (by someone else) so extreme I had to involve outside forces, later, and here I am, about to find out next month whether I get disability, thus ensuring a steady income of 70% of my previous part-time salary (stipend time again) or whether the string of mistakes made by said bully at the beginning of it all means I have to undergo another year of “reintegration activities”, also at said low wage (it’s an “incentive”)….
So I’m not happy. I am in fact profoundly UNhappy.
But so what?
If I focus on that I won’t be HAPPY. And the way I survive being unhappy is by being happy about every damn thing there is to be happy about. I’m happy I managed to write more or less coherently in this article (I’m unhappy the RSI is back in my right arm). I’m happy that the sun is shining (I’m deeply scared for some members of my family right now). I’m delighted that my decade of work on my tiny garden has rendered it a place of mature natural beauty, thronging with bees and birds (I’m sad my kid’s going through some stuff). The neighbors are cooking something that smells heavenly, I have antibiotics for a sudden minor medical emergency that would be profoundly unfair if unfairness were anything but a social construct, I was able to order some close-up filters so my photos look a lot better now, almost all my clothing has holes. There is a lot to be happy about. I embrace that. There is a lot to be unhappy about. So what? Thinking about it all the time, letting it get my heart rate up and take my attention away from the good stuff, doesn't change anything. So why let myself do it? I do what I can, the rest HAS to slide or it’ll trip me up.
I’m a walking dichotomy, I’m the disconnect queen, a set of drawbridges. Something like that.
So yeah, I’m happy. So what?
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