Last fall, one of my best friends called me on a Sunday morning to get some advice on a relationship. There were many moving parts to both the relationship and our conversation, but I remember something she said very clearly: “I don’t think I’m as happy as I could be.”
Which is, I have come to realize, perhaps the bravest statement of all, particularly when one intends to do something about it, as she did.
For a long time, I thought that achieving happiness was, very simplified, the act of assembling all of the things you were supposed to have. When your collection is complete—Education, Job, House, Romantic Lead —happiness is when you can sit back and admire the full set.
(If there were a top 25 playlist for my therapy sessions, this phenomenon would most certainly be on it.)
In my own pursuit of a full set (insert obvious joke, as needed), I became more preoccupied with simply filling the roles and less with the quality of the things and people with which I filled them. My junior spring, I had my first college boyfriend—and with him the satisfaction of having something in that particular box. Unfortunately, I reasoned somewhere in the more injured parts of myself that the act of having that box filled was worth his consistently debilitating treatment of me.
A few years later, entering an abysmal job market with a liberal arts degree, I accepted a job that I knew was a terrible fit and spent the subsequent sixteen months being kicked around by my bosses. Frequently during those months, I would go home, plug in my phone, sit down on the couch, and weep. Being screamed at on the phone, having my education thrown in my face, and generally being humiliated and degraded—I thought that was just the price of filling the Job box. It is a strange thing to get used to: feeling obligated to be grateful for something that makes you miserable.
Disturbing trend, isn’t it?
Though my advice-seeking friend probably does not suffer from my special brand of near-pathological myopia regarding ridiculous boxes, we somehow eventually arrived at a similar realization. In my case, when I started dating my next boyfriend, I began to have some point of comparison to the one before him and was downright horrified at what I had put up with. Likewise, when I dismally applied for another job and miraculously got it, I had to adjust my expectations for the better—the first time I gave something to my new boss, and he told me it was perfect and thanked me, I very nearly burst into tears of gratitude. When you’re in a bad situation and you have to make the most of it, maybe it’s not the best idea to examine how wretched and absurd it is on a regular basis. However, when you’re in that situation by some form of choice, when you tell yourself that this is one of those things that will make you happy and it doesn’t, it is surprisingly difficult to lift up your head, look around and realize that you deserve better.
My friend was in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious situation where she was middlingly happy but believed that she could be happier. Maybe I lack that sense, or, more likely, maybe out of cowardice and my obsession with those goddamn boxes, I decide to ignore it. In either case, it wasn’t after the fact that my friend lifted her head up and looked around—it was when she had that box filled, but knew she was not as happy as she could be.
Let me tell you, the force is strong with this one.
It’s a fairly terrifying leap of faith: letting go of something that makes you kind of happy so you can go after something that may really, truly blow your socks off. Letting go of any kind of happiness is painful, and I've come to believe that the letting go and the leaping towards something that may or may not be there is the hardest and bravest thing you can do for yourself. I don’t think my friend has necessarily found that which will leave her stunned, sockless, and ecstatic, but I believe it’s out there for her, and I know she’ll get there.
And I? I need to think outside the box. Literally. Suddenly I imagine a scene of empty packing boxes, labeled with all of the things that I think will make me happy. Have you ever jumped full force on an empty box? For items that seem so upstanding and solid, they collapse with surprising ease (particularly when one adds a few extra stomps for good measure). And so I jump up and down inside my head, collapsing these ridiculous boxes that have been taking up entirely too much space in my mind.
Maybe in the future that will make it easier for me, if necessary, to lift up my head, look around and decide that I deserve better.
