On my way to work this morning, I was listening to a podcast – actually, it was just a snippet of a Studio 360 program in which people were talking about happiness. A literature professor at NYU was talking about how, for the first time, her students were diagnosing (and dissing) literary characters. Like, “What’s wrong with Bartleby the Scrivener, he’s just depressed, someone should help him.” Like, “All Sylvia Plath ever does is whine.” Then Michael Cunningham reported that people sometimes tell him that they don’t want to read The Hours because they’re afraid it’ll bring them down, make them feel depressed. In the interview, he then said something like ‘is your hold on happiness so fragile that it could be upended by reading a novel?’ He went on to talk about Ahab on klonopin, Virginia Woolf on lithium. A klonopin-ed Ahab might just say “ah, let that whale do his thing, I’m fine with him, let him go find a female whale.” Would Virginia Woolf have been able to write with such subtlety and clarity about the full range of human experience if she’d been flattened by lithium?

I am not against medication, that’s absolutely not my point. I take medication; luckily, I don’t have to deal with something tragic like schizophrenia, or a condition that’s treated by devastating medication. I have a garden variety condition, and medication just allows me to be normal, which means I feel happy now and then, sad now and then, angry now and then, frustrated, joyous, depressed, the whole complement of human emotions. And I’m so grateful for that! Because I want to feel all those things, they’re the electricity of being alive. Even when I’m feeling really terrible, like the emotional floor dropped and I plummeted downward, even then I’m grateful that I get to experience it. I am always relieved when I leave that bleak state, of course, but I’m glad that I am able to feel it now and then.

I am also not saying that creativity requires mental illness (or alcoholism). Perhaps because my own emotional life is so complex, I do suspect that people who have to deal with emotional disturbances have a closer connection to the experience, and talk about it with greater richness. When I’m extremely happy, I just don’t have a lot of language to describe it. I say this again and again, but The Inferno is a much more interesting read than Paradiso. How many ways can you say “light, warm, love, happy”? Which is not to discount the experience of that at all! I love to feel that, too.

Part of my job involves acquiring books in positive psychology, and I have a complicated response to that field of research. On one hand, I value research and writing about what makes us strong, about what characterizes resilient people, about the very real strengths that humans often display. On the other hand, though, it slips too easily into life coaching, into “just think your way to happiness!”, into “clean out your closets and you’ll be happy!” I just did an Amazon book search for “happy” and found 34,467 results. It wasn’t a very refined search; some books in the list were against the simple concept of ‘just be happy,’ to be sure, but the vast majority were in the “just be happy” category. There are some outstanding books that take on this whole project, such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. She got breast cancer, and found that so many people told her she just needed to think positively and she’d be cured. Of course the flip side of that is that if you’re not cured, you must not have thought positively enough. I love this book, and love her approach to the whole magilla. She says it all with much more clarity and verve than I could say it.

I do think it’s a giant mistake, our cultural move towards believing that we should all just be happy. It’s right there from our beginnings, right: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Let’s all pursue happiness, get the hell out of my way you’re seriously interfering with my happiness. Somewhere along the way, the concept shifted from the one Aristotle developed (using reason well over the course of a full life is happiness. Doing anything well requires virtue or excellence, and therefore living well consists of activities caused by the rational soul in accordance with virtue or excellence.) Happiness is about being thoughtful in the action of life. It doesn’t say that happiness is creating a trouble-free life; it doesn’t say that happiness is about refining your life so all you do is the fun stuff; it doesn’t say that happiness simply equals living exclusively with the feeling of happy. Maybe that’s one of the problems; “happy” is a feeling, and it’s great! But happiness does not equal living in that state all the time.

We all have to figure this out for ourselves. For me, happiness and well-being is patchwork; some of this, some of that, more of this, a splash of red, some black to make the colors pop, and you can only really see the picture from far away.

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