Sexeteria

This is post #1 in a series about the concept and reality of happiness--and how both are changing for me. I found I had more to say than I expected, so I'm breaking it up. The main question for this post is: Do you--or have you ever--seen some of yourself in any parts of this, too? What thoughts does it jog in your mind about happiness and what makes us happy at different times in life? Ever been happy in unhappiness?

There's a very famous opening line from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that goes, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

The line is quoted a lot, to the point that I'd say it's assumed aphoristic status. People continue to quote it because they feel it reflects a basic life truth.

I was one of these people for a very long time. Even before I'd technically read it, I'd fallen for this line, sinker and hook, the way one does for a bad, yet irresistible, lover. I met it, swallowed it, believed its story implicitly, and adjusted my life to accommodate it.

Now I think it's bunk. Now I think I sold myself a bill of (very discounted, defective) goods.

Tolstoy's line is the precursor to a lengthy story about a number of extremely unhappy and dysfunctional families. It's basically a sales pitch for the book--and, one might project, for much of Tolstoy's writing and world view. "I can't write about happy families, because their stories are always the same. Happy families are boring. But misery--misery is interesting. There are a million ways to be miserable, each an intriguing story of its own. Whereas, there is only one way to be happy, and it's not worth talking about."

How dismissive that is. And, I'm learning, how entirely untrue.

But it has taken a long, long while for me to realize that.

For years, I did believe that the only interesting stories were stories of struggle. Of depression and doomed efforts and addiction and dysfunction and darkness. Of confirmation of the world's general fucked state, the mainstream populace's drone-like acceptance of and complicity in maintaining said state, and of the small efforts of isolated freaks to fight back against the oppressive norm, doomed as those efforts might ultimately be.

I believed this not only of fictional stories, but of real life stories. Normal, happy people were dull. They hadn't LIVED. They had no stories.

And I wanted stories.

I began to surround myself with others who believed this, too, and who wanted stories. People who were devastatingly interesting in their unique unhappinesses. Who held up their dysfunctions like flags of victory. Who loved and were proud of their pain, and who loved others for their pain. And who, though they'd not admit it, were always comparing each other's pain and deriving a sense of superiority from it, both as a group, against the outside, and individually, against each other.

Who hurts the most? Whose pain is most exquisite? Who is the most beautifully fucked up? Whose drama is the most evident? ¿Quien es mas forastero? (Who's the most "outsider"?)

These were "my people." Our glory and validation came from being unglorious. From being unhappy, and beaten down, and isolated, and freakish ("By whose standard?" the voice in my head wants to ask now). We took great joy in things like that first Radiohead single. You know, the one where the singer screams about wanting to be with a special, beautiful person, but no, he can't because (cue the anthemic swell of power chords) he's a creep, he's a weirdo...he doesn't belong here. It was our anthem, sung back to us. We loved it. We believed it. And more than that, we WANTED it. We wanted the weirdo, outsider status. We wanted the power chords when we walked in the room.

We chose to live in that song's push-pull, yearn-repel dichotomy. Because that, we felt, was interesting.

Oh sure, we, like the singer, told ourselves and others that we wished we could happily "float like a feather in a beautiful world." We wanted a perfect body. We wanted a perfect soul. But then again, we didn't. We didn't dare. Because happy, perfect people were all alike. Happy, perfect people didn't write songs like "Creep." Happy, perfect people didn't write great novels like Anna Karenina. Happy, perfect people didn't pen poems like Bukowski. Happy, perfect people didn't make art, didn't change the world, didn't inspire anything. Happy people were just...happy. Nonentities. And that...that ain't "so fucking special" after all, is it?

No, it was our want of the happy and perfect, and the ultimate disappointment of not having it, of knowing we would never measure up, that kept us interesting. If we actually got to happy, we disappeared.

I can never be happy because I won't be SPECIAL if I'm happy.

Everywhere you turn in that sentence, a trap door, leading you right back into the cell you just left.

As I said, I walked into the trap and stayed there for a long time.

I didn't want to be dismissed, devalued, and disappeared; to have my story waved off as "alike" and not worth notice. I didn't want to be lumped in with the great mass of bourgeois, boring, average humanity. I wanted to be special, and different, and interesting.

I became ashamed to be normal. And I became afraid to be happy. Because happiness meant extinction. And expulsion from my chosen "family" of outsiders. You got happy, you ceased to matter.

So I clung to the most miserable, dysfunctional parts of me. I held them close, always nursing them first, so they became strong enough to push and hold any more hopeful aspects of myself away from the bottle till they became puny and weak. I let these unhappy parts grow out of all balance and control, until they had become so powerful, they could quickly and brutally devour any small happinesses I managed to produce, like Saturn devouring his children. I let it take me over, until I was seemingly incapable of even allowing myself to announce to myself or others any level of happiness, pride, or self-satisfaction without tagging on some kind of devaluing statement at the end to allow people--and myself--to discount it and demolish it. And I became very careful to never let the feeling grow too strongly. If I felt it rising up, I pushed it down so it could be controlled--so that I wouldn't "curse" myself by feeling good. Because I did believe that if I openly had positive expectations, or if I openly proclaimed happiness, I would be set upon by twofold the karmic misery to slap me down, punish me for my hubris, and keep me in my place.

Natural happiness in myself and others was considered unnatural and suspect; by both myself and my friends. We developed the angry "just you wait" attitude about anyone who seemed to self-satisfied, including ourselves. And the only "legitimate" way to feel "acceptably" happy became through temporary, artificial means. Drugs, alcohol, food, sex, live music...anything that created a fast, temporary happiness spike that was absolutely guaranteed to shortly afterward bring on a crash and transform itself into some kind of negative, self-sabotaging consequence that ensured we wouldn't stay happy for too long.

And, because that simply wasn't enough to guarantee my safe haven from happiness, I also befriended and made lovers of others who were doing the same thing I was--because, you see, then their miseries and unhappinesses and dysfunctions would impact me, and provide me with MORE pain and unhappiness and drama to nourish the beast, their intersections with and insinuations into my life making my own exponentially more fucked up and "interesting."

How incredibly crazy it looks to me now, from the outside--this nourishing of pain we gave to each other, which at the time looked so much like the tenderest love.

And you know, as strange as it sounds, at the time I did think I was happy. I felt I was living an interesting and authentic--if sometimes painful--life. But the authentically painful life was cool, because after all, as the movie once said, "Life IS pain...anyone who says differently is selling something." Right? And because, as the song reiterated long after Tolstoy's time, "I focus on the pain, the only thing that's real." Right?

I felt I was happy because I felt I hadn't bought the bill of goods. I hadn't allowed myself to disappear into smug, apathetic complacency. Pain was the price you paid for being real, for being brave and creative enough to stand out; for facing life and saying, "Fuck you, I can take it." Pain was the price you paid to be free of the bullshit.

It never occurred to me at the time that perhaps this, too, was bullshit.

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photo credit: I'm not smiling by Thao