As I wrote the title to this post, I had a choice to make.
Technically, “OK” is the correct way to write this colloquialism that denotes approval or acceptance. “Okay” is the long road, more letters than necessary and a little extra typing for my fingers.
But “okay” also feels a lot less forceful. It’s gentler and quieter than its counterpart. And while I’m often an exclamatory, borders-on-obnoxious person, the spirit of this post is long and lowercase.
We all know the feeling: whether we’re authentically happy or put-on-a-mask happy, we suddenly hit a wall. It might be exhaustion, or confusion. For 18.1% of the United States, it’s that blanket of anxiety or depression that descends upon the body, sometimes for years. Sometimes the causes are clear. Sometimes there are none at all.
Why does being unhappy feel so taboo? How do we work out of (or within) the valleys we stumble (or get tossed) into?
***
Let’s wrestle a little with the first question.
I highly recommend reading blogger Zat Rana’s post that looks to separate the purpose of life and happiness — two grand items we tend to conflate when we maybe shouldn’t. I read it fairly recently, and it immediately has reoriented the way I’m handling an unhappy hiccup in my otherwise happy-go-lucky routine.
We (society) tend to understand happiness as an end point. If we play the right cards each day, then we can reach a ceiling and stay there — or so the logic goes. I have traditionally adopted this approach to my daily life; I have practiced happiness to a point where it’s automatic. The most wonderful people appear at the corners of sidewalks and hallways, classrooms and meetings, and the machine that is my body-and-voice springs to life. “Heeeyy! What’s up? Good first couple of days back at school? Good, good. Yes — yeah, it’ll feel normal again real quick.”
But that’s not how happiness has always been understood; the current understanding is an Enlightenment-era phenomenon. It’s also not how happiness is understood in other cultural traditions. Buddhism, for instance, sees happiness as one piece of a cycle of emotions one must accept on their path toward enlightenment; people must learn to detach themselves from objects of happiness, because those objects are impermanent, and so is the happiness that comes with them. Apparently, Russians think Americans foolish for their overtly positive temperament.
We are all guilty, also (me very much included), of reinforcing an environment that understands unhappiness as a temporary diversion from a permanently joyful path — the “it’s not so bad, you’ll be alright, perk up!” environment that exhausts the genuinely sad, tired mind and body. To me, this is a forgivable human instinct; it seems odd — even rude, maybe — to call honest efforts to support another wrong, unhelpful, or imperfect. And this is admittedly subjective at some level; each person responds to support differently, and perhaps this kind of support is plenty for some.
Generally, though, a “perk up!” resolve still misses the point. At best, it is a cheap work-around for the hours where the head feels better hung chin-to-chest. At its worst, it invalidates a whole half of the uniquely human emotional experience. “Okay” is, implicitly, not okay. I’m not a linguistics professor…but that feels weird.
Let’s start a metaphor we’ll come back to. Envision a highway — perfectly flat — and you know the highway ends at a twinkling, white picket-fence town called “Happy.” At this point in the blog post, you’re headed that way. And any detour from this highway would feel wrong and dangerous.
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Now, here’s maybe an even trickier question: what can we do to navigate moments of unhappiness?
Oh, lordy. I don’t think there’s a perfect way to tackle this question. Just as the reasons for unhappiness vary by person, so, too, do the ways to wrestle with those moments that range from modest disappointment to melancholy. It would be nothing short of arrogant for me to try and suggest all-powerful solutions; if a psychology major friend of mine wants to tackle that task, by all means: take it away!
I will speak only to the things I’m confident can be of help to all of us: rethinking the word “happiness,” and heightening self-awareness.
When we rethink the word “happiness,” we can go one of two ways. We might redefine the term itself, or we might change how we understand it in the grand scheme of our day.
If we are going to redefine happiness, we should move to define it as an ongoing process toward contentment, rather than a “state.” It should be understood as an achievement, sure; but it should not be an everlasting one, never a plateau that can be reached and ridden into the sunset. False expectations make faltering that much more painful.
We might also add a definition (as dictionaries often do!) that says happiness is the result of correcting wrongness in our lives, a positive reaction to the negative. This avoids seeing happiness as an end state, but adds an element of reflexivity to it.
“We have the wrong idea about emotions,” writes Matt Hutson at Psychology Today. “They’re very rational; they’re means to help us achieve goals important to us, tools carved by eons of human experience that work beyond conscious awareness to direct us where we need to go.” Well said, Matt.
And here’s what’s really cool: in changing how we conceive of “happiness,” are we not, by the nature of words, changing “unhappiness” as well? Now, unhappiness is not a state, but is also ongoing, alive and active. That’s a lot less harrowing; it feels difficult to get stuck in a valley that’s constantly moving. We can move with it and, with time, out of it. “Happy” and “unhappy” are no longer static, and that’s important.
Our other option is not necessarily to redefine happiness, but to simply change the way we see it as part of our daily existence. What if we conceive of our day not in steps toward a happy ending (as if at 9:30pm we will finally grasp that bright white light, there — in the air! — that is…”happiness”); but as a collection of the happy and unhappy. Here, happiness is still a “state” to some extent; but we are seeing multiple states of being as useful and worth experiencing.
I like this option because it feels more creative to me; I feel I have agency over the term and what to do with it. For me, happiness here becomes one piece of a 500-piece puzzle, where the scene is an ominous storm rolling over a blooming meadow: there are scary clouds, there is a gray area, and there are collections of brightly colored grasses and flowers spread along the bottom third of the picture. With happiness as only a piece of the day, I can view the assembly as worthy — in all its dark and light — of contentment. Each day is a finished puzzle.
Now, this isn’t to suggest we always have the ability to pick up happiness and place it where we wish it would be; puzzle pieces aren’t that malleable, I suppose. But the change in thinking is valuable. It can really help to not necessarily pull us out of unhappiness, but to actually embrace it (like its happy counterpart) as one piece in a collection of daily experiences.
***
The last and very crucial piece in answering the question of how we navigate unhappiness is self-awareness — specifically, a heightened amount of it.
We all know the idea, at least: self-awareness is the looking inside ourselves, the evaluating where we are and why we are. We find weaknesses, strengths, good, bad, ugly, empowerment, abject failure. And when we are truly aware, we may hear our own breath and — albeit, gently — feel the pulse of a heart inside our chest.
All that stuff I threw at you a few paragraphs ago — the rethinking the words “happiness” and “unhappiness,” the eradication of end points or emotional “states,” the storm-flower puzzle that is daily life — is useless unless we stop to evaluate and reconsider. How can I possibly work with emotions like grief, distress, or exhaustion if I am not feeling myself slide in and out of them? We have to be willing (and I struggle with this immensely) to acknowledge the whole gambit of emotion and struggle equanimously. Until we do, we cannot adopt new ways of thinking and coping with all those emotional elements of human life.
Self-awareness also means knowing what we as individuals need when we are in our ruts and valleys. We might have several self-selected strategies to cope. For instance, I might choose from taking a morning off of classes to just sleep; cracking my window and removing all sound from my life except for those fine sounds of the city and just breathing deeply for 15 minutes; or lifting at the gym. The strategies don’t have to be fancy; they just have to work. (If you do want some ideas, though, you can start here.)
Last thing, big thing: we have got to become more comfortable revealing our unhappiness. And believe me, I am the absolute worst at this — the vulnerability, the admitting unhappiness, the answer to “how are you?” that isn’t “Good, how are you?” In writing this paragraph, I’m talking to myself as much as I’m talking to y’all. God, that response is so automatic at this point; it’s almost disgusting, so robot-machinatic. I can’t even articulate how badly I wish we could just talk about all things the way we talked about good things. Can we work on that? Let’s work on that. And this is self-awareness: knowing when we are straight-up lying, creating positive motions where there are none, speaking our own fiction.
***
Remember that highway to a town called “Happy?” Let’s head back there.
Y’all, there is no town called “Happy.” It’s not an arrival point. Happiness, unhappiness: perhaps they’re parallel lanes, or they’re the ditches on both sides of the highway. I don’t know what they are, but I know what they aren’t. They aren’t static and it’s not useful for us to keep thinking of them that way. You can’t “detour” to a point that doesn’t exist. So quit looking for the directive signs and realize the highway is anything but flat; instead, it rolls high and low for miles. And that’s okay.
We have to realize that it is 100%, absolutely, entirely human and normal and wonderful to be unhappy. We have to start understanding dusk and night the way we understand dawn and day, as equally valuable elements of an ongoing process. We’ve got to quit chiding ourselves when we are in need of respite. We need to know ourselves and we need to know each other and we need to talk to each other — about every kind of happiness.
Seriously: it’s okay to not be okay.
