128. Happyish

Nora recounts how when she first lost Aaron and her dad, she was always chasing happiness to avoid her grief. Now, years later, she doesn’t purely feel happiness — she feels happy-ish, and that’s plenty.

Nora’s new Happyish journal and affirmation deck based on her own journaling practices launches today! We have a special deal for you on these new items: 

25% discount for the Em & Friends website. Coupon code: HAPPYISH25. This will only work on the Em & Friends website, not on Amazon.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

INTRO MUSIC

The following is a true story:

In January 2015, I was laying in my best friend’s guest room, next to my sleeping toddler. I was not sleeping, because I hardly ever slept. My body was jacked up on cortisol and grief after losing a pregnancy on October 3, my father on October 8, and finally…my husband on November 25.

I didn’t lose any of them, I don’t know why I just said that. 

They died.

Three losses in a row, riptides pulling me further and further out to sea. I could see my old life, could see people waving from the shore, but I couldn’t get there. 

Grief is disorienting, and I was completely lost. I couldn’t feel anything, but everything felt like too much. It was as though the entire world was on the other side of a thick pane of glass, and I couldn’t get through.

I no longer had a job, because grief had made it impossible for me to sleep, which made it impossible for me to get through a workday, meet deadlines, do my job. I had a home, but I couldn’t bear to be in it. My child and I bopped from city to city, staying with anyone who would have us, and I tried to keep it together for him.

If you have ever grieved in America, you know that it is…not easy. Not fun! Not really what people want you to do. People want you to get over it. Maybe even some people who are listening to this right now. Come on! It’s going to be ok! That’s what your dead husband told you, right? Get to the hope!

And we will. But first, we will go back to my friend’s guest room. Because while I was laying next to my sleeping child, I was listening to a self-help book.

A self-help book about how to get your life together. How to be HAPPY.

Because that’s what I should be, right?

Happy! I had a child! I had found love! I had a place to stay! It had been three whole months, it was time to get it together and follow the simple steps in this book which, like all self-help books, boil down to:

Don’t be sad.
Be happy. 

Be grateful. 

Set and achieve your goals and don’t make any excuses.

I would fall asleep somewhere around 3 or 4 in the morning with these words playing in my ears, hoping I would soak them in and wake up…better.

And oh my god, looking back I wish I could jump in bed next to that version of myself, rip out her ear buds and tell her that the only cure for what she was going through was to ACTUALLY FEEL IT? That three months is NOTHING. That happiness is not a final destination and gratitude is not a blunt object that you can use to bludgeon your sadness out of you.

I’m a recovering perfectionist who has spent years freeing herself from the chokehold of the self-help industry and all its promises: that life can be solved, fixed, tamed. Immediately after those losses, the Optimist Industrial Complex whirred to life around me: everyone wanted me to be better, and fast. 

And I tried, really. I went to the gym and I put on lipstick and I smiled like everything was fine when really, I was as unwell as I’d ever been. But of course I was! I was having a normal, natural reaction to loss! It was actually perfectly fine that I wasn’t fine, but the more I tried to pretend I was okay, the more terrible I felt. 

Now, I have nothing against positivity, and I’m generally a pretty upbeat person. But Toxic Positivity insists that we only look at the bright side, that we focus on the silver lining even when the storm clouds are turning into a hurricane around us. It’s unhelpful and unhealthy…and it doesn’t work; studies have shown that the pursuit of happiness can actually make you less happy. So does that mean we’re all just destined to be miserable forever? Of course not. Because things are hardly ever just miserable. If you’ve ever laughed at a funeral or cried at a wedding, you know that we’re capable of experiencing a whole lot of feelings seemingly all at once. 

The self-improvement space is a multibillion-dollar industry that thrives on our human desire for more: more success, more mastery, more happiness. It tells us how to optimize our lives and live up to our potential, how to hack our way out of who and where we are with countless tips and tricks that could work if only life were that simple. 

But there were no tips and tricks that could bring back my father or my husband or that baby, no secret to restoring the family and the life that I’d dreamed of. I knew I wouldn’t always feel so horrible, but I did feel SO HORRIBLE.

Happiness is no longer my standard for emotional wellness. It’s no longer a destination I’m trying to reach or my standard for emotional wellness.

I am no longer in my friend’s bed, sleepless and listening to some enormously wealthy idiot tell me that the problem is me. I’m sleepless in my OWN bed playing Stardew Valley. I have a husband next to me, who I love, and a husband I will love and miss for the rest of my life. The baby I had with him is a large child, and he has three siblings of varying genetic parentage. 

We have what we need, and we miss what we had. 

We aren’t always happy, but we’re happyish…and that’s all I could ever hope for.

OUTRO MUSIC

CREDITS