Authors: Augusten Burroughs
H
OW TO
L
IVE
U
NHAPPILY
E
VER
A
FTER
I
JUST WANT
to be happy.”
I can’t think of another phrase capable of causing more misery and permanent unhappiness. With the possible exception of, “Honey, I’m in love with your youngest sister and she’s agreed to marry me so I’d like a divorce.”
Yet at first glance, it seems so guileless. Children just want to be happy. So do puppies and some middle-aged custodians.
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.
Here’s the problem: when you say to yourself or somebody else, “I just want to be happy,” the implication is that you’re not.
So what you want is something you don’t have.
That’s a mole behind your ear. Maybe it’s just a mole and that’s all it is. Wanting health insurance when you don’t have it, wanting your kids to get a good education—nothing troubling about that.
But maybe that mole is something worse that’s going to spread. And you become a person who moves frantically through life grabbing things off the shelf—the dark-haired boyfriend with the great parents since the blond musicians haven’t worked out so well, the breast implants because then you’ll like your body, the law degree that will make your father so proud of you and maybe you’ll learn to like the law—but never managing to find the right thing, the one thing that will finally make you feel you aren’t missing something essential, such as the point.
The “I just want to be happy” bear trap is that until you define precisely, just exactly what “happy” is, you will never feel it.
By defining what “happy” means to you in absolutely concrete terms you can then see what actions you need to take—or subtractions you need to make—to be able to say, “Yup, okay. This is the happy I was looking for. I’ve got it now. It’s safe to get the breast implants.”
If you’re not a bespoke sort of person, you could use the standard, off-the-shelf definition.
Happiness is “a state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.”
It’s probably far-fetched to think you could be in a state of intense joy for most of the day. But maybe you could be mostly content.
Whatever being happy means to you, it needs to be specific and also possible. Maybe if you didn’t have to go to work every day at a job you only tolerate but instead started your own online jewelry business. Maybe this would make you happy
because you love jewelry; you find it interesting, you like to make it, you like the people who like it.
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.
This recipe of defining what happiness means to you and then fiddling with your life to make the changes needed to make yourself happy 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.
I feel contentment rarely, but I do feel it.
A lot of the time what I feel is interested. Or I feel melancholy. And I also frequently feel tenderness, annoyance, confusion, fear, hopelessness, friskiness.
It doesn’t all add up to anything I would call happiness.
What I’m thinking is, is that so terrible?
I used to say “I just want to be happy” all the time. I said it so frequently and without care that I forgot to refill the phrase with meaning, so it was just a shell of words.
When I said these words, I had only a vague sense of what happiness even meant to me.
I can see it in others. I even know one person who is happy 95 percent of the time, seriously. He’s not stupid. As a matter of fact, he’s right here beside me as I write, his own computer on his own lap organizing his playlist. And he makes me happy more often than I have ever been happy. But I will never be as happy as he is. And I don’t mind this because I might not appreciate his happiness so much if I had it, too.
Also, I know a physicist who loves his work. People mistake his constant focus and thought with unhappiness. But he’s not unhappy. He’s busy. I bet when he dies, there will be a book on his chest.
Happiness is a wonderful goal for those who are inclined on a genetic level toward that emotional end of the spectrum.
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 can be fascinated instead of happy.
H
OW TO
F
EEL
L
ESS
R
EGRET
R
EGRET IS A HOLLOW
thing.
Regret is the lost and found of life. You can go there and sit and be one half of something that belongs to something else that isn’t there anymore. You can wait and wait and wait and wish that everything, all of it, had turned out a different way. But wishing is the meal you only dreamed you ate. In regret, you still remain so fully half, and entirely unclaimed.
Regret is the feeling at the very bottom of impossible.
Regret is like a diamond: it’s forever. Once you have entered a state of regret, you do not leave it.
It is not overbearing, like grief. Unlike grief, it does not transform into something else or get less intense over time.
Like all the other high-octane feelings—anger, jealousy, love—regret can be burned as fuel. In fact, it should be. Regret should power something beneficial.
To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point.
Each thing should change you, if ever so slightly.
You can use regret to fuel learning so you do not repeat mistakes. You can use it to fuel art so that you spend a great deal of time examining regret and you come to learn its particular pain and fit yourself around it, so perhaps sometimes you hardly notice it at all. Regret can power your telescope, changing what you see.
Once you have felt regret, it has been in you and you have been in it and this does not change. It is like virginity that way.
Just as you would pull your hand away from something hot, the instinct is to withdraw but this is regret’s strength, the relentless chase it gives; and it always wins.
But there is one way to feel less regret over the things that have happened in your life.
Through gratitude and humility.
Every assault, each transgression, all of the offenses, mistakes, and horrors. Because in truth, each was utterly essential in creating the person who sits now on the other side of this page.
I am speaking now about recycling on the molecular level. I am speaking of looking at all you were given in exchange for a single mugging.
You survived. Other people who were mugged did not, but you did.
You came to understand fear. Now, if somebody you knew were assaulted, the things you said would be the things that mattered most for them to hear; your compassion becomes wider exponentially.
Consider the bounty of your dead. All the people you have
lost in your life have taught you what value is. They taught you how rare it is to breathe, how unbearably beautiful and sacred it is to feel an ache in the center of your heart.
Think of all that has happened. Each hurt has held you back in life. And now swim under the hurt and deeper, beneath the limitations these past events have imposed on you.
If you are betrayed, focus on what you learned, not how you were fooled.
If you lose your home, focus on what you want your new home to feel like.
If you fall out of love, remember the love and not the fall. If all you focus on is the fall, the fall will swallow you because it will grow. Focus is water and sunlight. It causes growth.
Recalculate all the wrongs that have been done to you and examine the benefits that happened as a result of them. Be grateful for the bad things that happened and were in some way responsible for the good things that followed.
Did you catch that
be
?
Be. Thankful.
Because this one can slip right past you so easily.
Telling
yourself you’re thankful—“No, I totally get what you’re saying and I really am grateful, you know, for a lot”—is not the same as
being
thankful. It’s not the same as
feeling
that although betrayal hurts in the rudest, most brutal way, it does leave behind highly valuable knowledge in the form of experience. What you gain is larger and more valuable for your life as a whole than what you lost to betrayal. Because each betrayal is studied by your instincts. And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person’s most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly
guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don’t know how or why. But I know that every significant experience—positive or negative—sharpens them and makes them more accurate.
Only by embracing all that you regret and not denying it, only by placing the highest value on what you’ve gained because of all you’ve lost, does regret lose the ability to cripple you.
It was difficult for her to speak, as though she hadn’t spoken a word for many years and things had settled in her throat—things she wished she’d said, feelings she never expressed, her worst fears.
She coughed several times and when the words finally did arrive they were soaking wet.
“My son died two months ago from alcoholism. What is almost worse for me than losing Sean, that was his name, but what was almost worse than losing him is knowing that he died alone in his apartment, drunk. The loneliness he must have felt to drink himself literally to death.” She paused here and I thought she might not continue but she did.
“When I think of it I can’t think of it for very long or I feel like I will die, too. And yet, I can’t stop going back there in my mind to his apartment to try and be with him. Even if I couldn’t have stopped him from drinking that night, I could—
I would
—have just sat there beside him and held his hand while he . . .”
This was a comment from an audience member at one of
my book signings. The bookstore had printed flyers advertising my event. They read,
SPEND A HILARIOUS EVENING WITH AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
.
The audience was silent and in suspense. Clearly, they felt terrible for this poor woman. It was possible the audience was also just a tiny bit thrilled that I was on the stage and not them; they would not have to say a word to the woman. I would.
I was quite eager to say something to her because I had already heard the un-truth inside what she said and I knew that once I pointed to it, she would see it, too.
I couldn’t cut her off; I had to let her finish telling me. And the instant she fell silent, I asked, “Ma’am, how old was your son? How long had he been drinking?”
It was not the response she had expected, if she had expected anything. “He was twenty-five. He’d been struggling with alcohol since he was fourteen but his father and I didn’t know about it until he was eighteen.”
“Okay,” I said. “So he was an alcoholic for more than half his life. I mean, it’s not like this guy picked up a bottle one night and drank himself to death; he had a long history of heavy drinking. Right?”
All she did was nod.
“Yeah. Well, I’m very sorry you lost your son, I’m sorry he died. But I can tell you as an alcoholic myself, your son probably had a wonderful death. When you’ve been drinking that long, it takes a tremendous amount of alcohol to take you to ‘that place’ that you need to reach. And when you are there, inside of that drinking night, even if you are lonely, it is a very familiar, almost comfortable kind of lonely. And when you are that drunk, it is just impossible to explain how wonderful it can feel, the complete oblivion. I mean, there is a reason most
alcoholics will not recover. It feels good, even as it ruins your life.
“I can tell you that I have woken up with lacerations, in terrifying locations with completely unfamiliar and unappealing people; but all of it was an adventure, when I was doing it. So I think the chances are, your son was engaged in some elaborate drunk fantasy and then he passed out and that was it. It is terrible and very sad that your son didn’t want to get sober, but it is a fact that he did not because ultimately, he preferred being drunk.
“Which means, your son died doing what he loved most in the world. And I think there is no possible better death than to die while you are doing something you love above all else.”
The woman clutched the wad of tissues in her hands and brought them both to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said.
And I thought, “Oh, fuck. She totally doesn’t understand what I said.”
Then the words escaped her as though a valve had burst and carried the words on a jet of air. “I never thought of it like that. I never did.”
“I am right about this. I almost died alone in my apartment from drinking. Your son was in the same place but then he kept going. I can also tell you, he sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted his mom sitting there holding his hand or whatever. You know? You did all you could do; you gave birth. Beyond this, it’s up to him. It really and truly is. I don’t mean to devalue the role of the parent but, speaking from my own experience, thank God parents aren’t actually a necessity.”
The thing is, you just wouldn’t think on the face of it that there was any deeper truth to be found beyond the facts as she laid them out.