The Dangers of Happiness

This post from Velveteen Mind is really standing out for me. She talks a little about cracking under the pressure of happiness and holy hell do I know that feeling. After even just a few days along, it’s so clear that what brought me here wasn’t anything going wrong in my life or my marriage. It was everything going right.

My whole life shifted hard on its axis last June when I changed jobs. I’ve written about it over and over, but it was a moment of intense change I’m still recovering from. Suddenly, the outer workings of my life all fell into place where I wanted them. I’d paid off my last credit card. I was working full time as a writer. I lived in the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood with a great housemate. I was surrounded by wonderful friends and neighbors in a thriving community. I had three healthy wonderful kids and a great partner to raise them with.

You’d think I’d be happy then, right?

I thought so. But I wasn’t. Instead every bad feeling I’d bottled up or brushed aside for a decade came pouring out into the center of my mind and heart. Every compromise I’d made in seven years of marriage felt unbearable. I’d wake in the night grieving for my younger self and the sexual violence I endured then, as if the crimes had happened yesterday.

I felt numb and trapped, even as I was living my dream life. Not because there was something wrong with the dream. Because I was safe and free and stable enough to let myself feel all that stuff.

I’ve been aware of this for awhile, have talked it over with numerous friends. It’s obvious, from the outside. And now I’m standing outside my life, really experiencing it instead of drowning in the bad feelings and just believing that they’ll stabilize again. Getting to see these upheavals from the outside makes me feel so hopeful. It makes me want to run and give my whole life a big hug.

So if happiness triggered my breakdown, is the secret to stay forever unhappy? Always striving and never arriving?

I don’t think so. I think the trick to living with happiness is the same as the trick to living with any other overwhelming feeling or situation: get used to it. Make it routine. And that’s what I’m doing here in California. I wrote about my discovery that I already live the way I want to, day to day.

In the peace I’ve found here, I’m taking some time to etch those routines deeper and clearer. I get up, I shower, I make a cup of tea. I go running. I light a candle by my desk to help me focus. I sit down to work. An hour later, I take a break and do my sitting meditation. An hour after that, I pause and do some stretches. More work. Mealtimes. Each hour I take a ten minute break; the later ones are filled with reading.

And so on. All these pieces were present in my days before, but here they take on clarity, their outlines shine: these are the pieces of my structure. They form the safe container where I can live my life. Where I can hold any feeling: grief, depression, rage, confusion. Even happiness and contentment.

When my life shifted and my work shifted, I needed to make a new set of structures for my time. The ones I used as a stay-at-home mom and a preschool teacher no longer worked.

It’s taken some time to lay in new structures, to build a new container. The stronger these routines get, though, the stronger I become. Even the small things – the cup of tea, the candle flame – make me stronger and more resilient. Better able to weather the inner storms that rise and the happiness that swells as I go about living my actually quite wonderful life.

Related posts:

1. To you we sing, and happiness we bring!
2. The dangers of bulk buying, and joining the Wise Bread staff