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1、How to live unhappily ever afterI just want to be happy.I cant think of another phrase capable of causing more misery and permanent unhappiness. With the possible exception of, Honey, Im in love with your youngest sister.Yet at first glance, it seems so guileless. Children just want to be happy. So
2、do puppies. Happy seems like a healthy, normal desire. Like wanting to breathe fresh air or shop only at Whole Foods.But I just want to be happy is a hole cut out of the floor and covered with a rug. Because once you say it, the implication is that youre not. The I just want to be happy bear trap is
3、 that until you define precisely, just exactly what happy is, you will never feel it. Whatever being happy means to you, it needs to be specific and also possible. When you have a blueprint for what happiness is, lay it over your life and see what you need to change so the images are more aligned.St
4、ill, this recipe of defining happiness and fiddling with your life to get it will work for some people but not for others. I am one of the others. I am not a happy person. There are things that do make me experience joy. But joy is a fleeting emotion, like a very long sneeze. A lot of the time what
5、I feel is, interested. Or I feel melancholy. And I also frequently feel tenderness, annoyance, confusion, fear, hopelessness. It doesnt all add up to anything I would call happiness. But what Im thinking is, is that so terrible?I know a physicist who loves his work. People mistake his constant focus
6、 and thought with unhappiness. But hes not unhappy. Hes busy. I bet when he dies, there will be a book on his chest. Happiness is a treadmill of a goal for people who are not happy by nature. Being an unhappy person does not mean you must be sad or dark. You can be interested, instead of happy. You
7、can be fascinated instead of happy.The barrier to this, of course, is that in our super-positive society, we have an unspoken zero-tolerance policy for negativity. Beneath the catchall umbrella of negativity is basically everything that isnt super-positive. Seriously, who among us is having a Great!
8、 day every day? Who feels Terrific, thanks! all the time?Anger and negativity have their uses, too. Instead of trying to alleviate some of the uncomfortable and unpleasant emotions you feel by trying to be positive, try being negative instead. Seriously, try it sometime. This will help you get in to
9、uch with how you actually feel: I feel hopeless and fat and stupid. And like a failure for feeling this way. And trying to be positive and upbeat makes me feel angry and feeling angry makes me feel like I am broken.If thats how you feelhowever you feelthen you have a base line, you have established
10、a real solid floor of reference. Sometimes just giving yourself permission to feel any emotion without judgment or censorship can lessen the intensity of those negative emotions. Almost like youre letting them out into the backyard to run around and get rid of some of that energy.A corollary to the
11、idea that we must all be happy and positive all the time is that we must all be healed. When I was 32, somebody I loved died on a plastic-covered twin mattress at a Manhattan hospital. His death was not unexpected and I had prepared myself years in advance, as though studying for a degree. When he d
12、ied, I was as stunned as if he had been killed by a grand piano falling from the top of a building. I was fully unprepared.I did not know what to do with my physical self. It took me about a year to stop thinking, madly, I might somehow meet him in my sleep. Once I finally believed he was gone, I be
13、gan the next stage: waiting. Waiting to heal. This lasted several years.The truth about healing is that heal is a television word. Someone close to you dies? You will never heal. What will happen is, for the first few days, the people around you will touch your shoulder and this will startle you and
14、 remind you to breathe. You will feel as though you will soon be dead from natural causes; the weight of the grief will be physical and very nearly unbearable.Eventually, you will shower and leave the house. Maybe in a year you will see a movie. And one day somebody will say something and it will ca
15、use you to laugh. And you will clamp your hand over your mouth because you laughed and that laugh will break your heart, it will feel like a betrayal. How can you laugh?In time, to your friends, you will appear to have recovered from your loss. All that really happened, youll think, is that the hole
16、 in the center of your life has narrowed just enough to be concealed by a laugh. And yet, you might feel a pressure for it to be true. You might feel that enough time has passed now, that the hole at the center of you should not be there at all.But holes are interesting things. As it happens, we human beings are able to live just fine with many holes of many sizes and shapes. Pleasure, love, compas
