The Burden of Happiness
Relating beyond the monochrome
Standing by the kitchen counter, making an uninteresting sandwich for myself, I start having an imaginary conversation with my grandma, who is 85 and recently started using a cane to walk, which I haven’t yet had the chance to see in action.
I speculate that the next time we see each other she would eventually bring up the topic of me finding someone (a partner for life). A dashing man, possibly. My grandma doesn’t know about my queerness.
With her cheeky voice, lowered in accordance with the intimacy of the question: “Var mı kız biri?”
And I would think —yes, there is somebody. And I intend to grow old with her.
But this part doesn’t even last that long in my speculating mind. Like butter that melts on a slice of freshly warmed bread. I practice the scenario where I would smile confidently, happily, calmly, performatively, and say: “Grandma, I am loved, and I love.” Maybe she would, deep down, get the point. But I wouldn’t take any chances. So, more words and hopefully a reassuring sentiment: “I am happy, grandma.”
My hands move automatically, placing the cheese on the bread and I feel the words vibrate softly but heavily in me: the burden of happiness.
I did think-feel this before, and even had conversations with friends about it. How after a certain time (age?) the relationship with one’s parents/elderly shifts from a rebellious/judgemental one into one of responsibility —to keep them unworried, reassured of your wellbeing.
My imaginary conversation with my grandma involves issues of heteronormativity, acceptance, assumptions about people’s inner worlds and their capacity to expand their minds and hearts. But in that morning with the sandwich, I found myself drawn into a specific issue: putting someone’s desire for your happiness ahead of anything else. Which, for me, meant glorifying happiness as a state of being in such a way that all the other particularities of your life become dulled under the blinding glitter of happiness.
But this ‘burden of happiness,’ in a broader sense, is something I have caught within myself years ago, even before I noticed that my role as a child has started transforming. A burden to become happy, intimately connected with an incapacitating fear of unhappiness. I have an undated note in a tiny old notebook, at least from six years ago, where I wrote down in black ink: “Why am I so afraid of sadness?” I still wonder why I have been so obsessed with un/happiness.
But I guess it’s not just me: human history as we’ve been taught takes very seriously the question of the ‘good life’ (ethics). Maybe those ancient (western) philosophy courses shaped me a bit too deeply. Education is impactful, I am reminded once again.
Meanwhile the title of the first course that flung me into the ecstatic galaxy of thinking blinks like the neon sign of a late-night snack bar: ethics of happiness.
The question is not why I am now still obsessed and burdened with the notion of happiness. That’s a useless chicken and egg situation. I have been asking this question for too long, in the same exact way. That is why I know I need new, better questions. Maybe different angles, fresh colors of light thrown onto the problem.
I think I miss talking to a friend about such questions. Are they also burdened by happiness? My head bombards me with ‘of course’s, ‘duh’s, and the pervasiveness of the capitalist neoliberal culture around happiness. I believe that most of my friends would recognize the pressure to be happy —the ‘good vibes,’ ‘toxic positivity,’ the products we are sold to attain that very specific happiness. Ideas of family, friendship, romantic/sexual relationships —whose end goal all seem to be happiness. And I won’t lie, sometimes I hear myself saying “so what, happiness isn’t bad?” But I can’t let go of this devouring curiosity about how deeply this rigid orientation towards happiness shapes us, or how this orientation makes us move around/in the world with stiff steps, unable to actually touch each other in that rigidity.
Before I started having that imaginary conversation with my grandma, I was reading something on the value and beauty of difficult things in life and how much we need them (not to appreciate the value of easy things, measured against the value of difficult things!), how meaningful they are. That there is (usually) a depth in the difficulty of unhappiness, sadness. A depth that opens up the layers of planets within each of us.
I feel suffocated in the narrow binary of pain and pleasure, of unhappiness and happiness. All that lies (and thrives) between them gets brushed aside, at most labeled as grey. As if there isn’t a whole rainbow there.
Happiness tastes like just one color. Yet I keep catching myself (sometimes in my imagination, sometimes in actual phone calls) reassuring others that I have that yellow1 —that I am certainly, ostentatiously, defined by that color, or I solely intend to be so. That I am ‘happy.’
Don’t get me wrong. Happy is nice. It’s fun. It can be many things. But a universe lies beyond happy. I feel we haven’t been really equipped to explore other colors, other galaxies, or have been discouraged from doing so. A step into that beyond is seen as a painful grey, if not a dangerous darkness. And even if we do the work of noticing the other colors, learning to see their beauty and depth, it often remains almost a taboo to do that exploration together with people who love you, people with whom you are in a caring relationship. Because all they want you to be is happy. The tricky thing is that that is all I want for them too.
The burden of happiness is knotty, ubiquitous, ossifying, relational.
So maybe we need to look more carefully at the relationship between happiness, care and love next time we burden the ones we love with ‘happiness,’ whose glittery flash makes us forget the beauty of dancing shadows.
For some reason, without overthinking for once, I am going with the first color that popped in my head when I thought ‘happiness.’ I’m sure there is more to that association.