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.

---
photo credit: I'm not smiling by Thao

I've been...just really happy lately.

It feels an odd thing to say. But it's true. And I find I'm also less and less afraid that claiming it will "curse" it and make it go away. I don't feel afraid to say it anymore. This also feels very strange to say.

But it's true. It came on slowly at first; just a little twinge here or there. But in the last two weeks, it's been almost constant. Just feeling good, feeling at one with the world--or maybe it's feeling as one in myself and being completely cool with that--even when the world is off kilter around me. Even feeling joyful sometimes; having moments when my heart feels ready to burst out in blooms like all the trees I see around me and I just can't stop smiling or singing to myself or communicating with trees.

This is not something I'm used to.

I think maybe I haven't written about this feeling as it's come over me much because; well, one, I've been busy with a new job I started recently, and two, I think I felt afraid that if I said it, it would sound like bragging or smugness or rubbing it in others' faces or possibly that I was being inauthentic...like I was trying to prove something (""Look!!! Look how happy I am!!! Really!!!! Really!!!!")--like I'd appear as if I were trying to convince myself and others of it.

But it's not about that. And it suddenly occurred to me tonight how entirely ridiculous it is that I saw absolutely no dangers of inauthenticity, bragging, etc. in writing repeatedly about unhappiness when it hit me. So why should this be any different?

Anyway, what's happened to me lately...it's really odd. It's like this kind of letting go. I can't explain it because it's almost a physical thing; as if a really heavy layer of something has been lifted off me, and I'm just walking around lighter than before. But it's not exactly physical. It is as though I've finally lost something, though, something that has been some kind of invisible albatross for many years. The strange thing is, I don't even know what the albatross WAS; I never got to see it. It just, through small tiny baby steps of work, seems to have just lifted, and I'm just...different. Things seem easier; and I seem less impacted by the small everyday things that used to get me spiraling into negativity.

And it seems that along with this is this fresh, slowly burgeoning change in how I sense myself in the world. I just wrote that and realized I'd said "sense myself" instead of "see myself," which is the familiar phrase. And now I realize that is exactly it! There's this shift from seeing myself to just sensing myself. This move from a staunch stance of "I think, therefore I am," to "I am, therefore I am."

Am I making sense to anyone out there? I think what this means is I'm losing my self-consciousness. Which is SUCH a relief. But even more than that--or maybe it's the same...what I'm trying to say here...and this is so new and confusing....

What I'm trying to say is that...well, for most of my life, I've created my identity (and others' identities, come to think of it) from identifiers--which are, of course, mental constructs. I thought that thoughts--mine and others' about me (by either agreement with or reacting against them)--were what made me me. Like this:

What do I believe in? The answer to that defines who I am; I am what I believe.
What do I know? The answer is who I am
What is my cultural identity? This is who I am.
How much more do I know than others? This is who I am.
How well do I fit the requirements for the labels of "cool," "smart," "pretty," "sexy," "talented," etc.? This is who I am.

Actually, these ALL boil down to the first statement: What do I believe in? This is who I am. Because all of the others in their way are beliefs about myself that I invent for myself.

And this has led to inordinate anger, frustration, and fear when I'm confronted with others whose opinions butt up significantly and forcefully against my own. I've been in therapy for a few years now; and the whole time I've never really been able to grasp how one can believe strongly in something (say, for instance, that racism is awful and destructive) and while holding that belief strongly, at the same time be okay with the fact that others don't.

I think this was because those beliefs were who told myself I was. I made those beliefs my identity. So someone opposing that belief was, on some level, threatening my right to exist.

I've been living so much in my head. And my head created labels for everything: for myself and others. I was alternative. That person was mainstream. This other person: materialistic. Me: stubborn. That person: racist. Me: creative. On and on and on. All these one-word stories for myself and everyone; all generated by me, all designed to keep my thoughts protected and safe from encroachment of others. Interestingly, I had both a great anger for/resistance to labels and "grades"--and yet such a great need for them, too. In fact, I made my resistance of them part of my so-called identity.

I'm getting off track. I'm sorry this post is so loose--I'm free-forming here.

The point is, this shift I was talking about earlier, and the happiness and lightness...it seems to be about losing all that. About getting out of my head--"losing my mind," if you will. About realizing none of that shit matters; that none of that stuff, none of my thoughts or ideas or beliefs, none of those identifiers define me. That I'm just ME. That's it. That's all it has to be about.

Moving away from thought and into this greater...sense of being. This is what feels lighter. And, by the way, this doesn't mean I think thinking or intelligence is useless. Far from it. It's useful; but it's just a THING--not THE thing.

You know, all this time as I've been healing, I've been trying so hard to figure out--now that I've had to let go of so many old, negative patterns of self-definition--what the new way to define myself will be. I kept thinking, "Okay, but what will I BE now? I'm emptying out of stuff, but what will I fill up with? Who can I say I am now, if I'm not any of those things anymore? I need to find an answer before it's too late!"

And damn if it hasn't turned out that the answer is I'm not anything.

And this...it turns out...is everything.

I'm not anything. I just am.

I'm not anything. It's possibly the one phrase that has scared me the most all these years--the one thing I was most terrified to be identified with; to believe about myself. The thing I've worked consistently to avoid anyone thinking about me.

Who knew in the end that it would be the source of all empowerment?

I am staggered by this.