The Joy of Disowning Happiness
There’s nothing like divorce to reveal how marriage can have as much to do with your family as it does your partner. Your wedding vows do not merely pledge allegiance to the perpetuity of your coupling but also commit you to an archetype of stability and achievement that comforts your loved ones. I did not truly appreciate that until I had seemed to betray my family by way of my wife. Telling my mother that I had chosen to separate from her daughter-in-law felt like forcing her to surrender her own offspring. It is little wonder, then, that Mom initially resisted the news.
“I just want to be happy,” I presented as a trump card: surely no parent would dream up anything else for their children.
“But happiness is fleeting,” she replied to my surprise.
Now I was betrayed. A narrative I invented, but I remember feeling like the Durhams would rather retain my ex if choosing between the two of us. That my mother would prefer me to be miserable and partnered than happy and single fractured my already broken heart. Her comment shadowed me for years.
She did not know it at the time, but when I had confessed aspirations for happiness, it was in a moment when death felt as attractive as life. In a DC suburb where we knew no one, my children just two and four, we were coughing up 80% of my nonprofit salary on rent. I was both caretaker and breadwinner as nursing school occupied my wife’s every hour. Noticing my isolation, she encouraged me to finally find a therapist. And in my first appointment, I spilled my guts, and wet behind the ears, this social worker admonished me: “if you’re gonna get divorced, better to do it now while your kids are so young.” (Don’t worry, I fired her after three sessions.) I told my wife how therapy went, i.e., that I wanted a divorce. And the weeks that followed were so nightmarish that killing myself seemed a viable option. Indeed, all I wanted was to be happy, but no pathway could lead me there.
Eight years later, in a heart-to-heart with a friend who has known me my whole life, and who shares my emotional disposition, I realize Mom was right. And she deserves my apology for resenting her. Being married was not the root cause of my despair. Not that I should’ve stayed, but divorce did not remove my sadness. Rather, it afforded me the opportunity to understand myself more clearly, and when I did, I could perceive Mom’s wisdom. I had miscalculated my coordinates by setting happiness as my destination.
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I wonder if other writers can relate: my favorite piece is my least popular. I argued in Love > Hope that if we associate hope with certitude that we will realize our dreams, our movements are doomed, for the earth will become uninhabitable far before we are likely to abolish racial capitalism, which is what social justice requires. But even if we reinterpret hope as Mariame Kaba famously does - something you do, not something you have - love offers more nutritious sustenance. I stay motivated to end homelessness because I love humanity, not because I believe we will witness a world where no one languishes unsheltered. My peers rebuff this take because they think it means I’m giving up. Quite the opposite is true. I have tapped into a more sustainable wellspring, one that drives me to deepen my commitment to abolition irrespective of the likelihood I will ever taste the fruit of organizers’ labor.
Joy is to happiness what love is to hope. Especially in the face of political apocalypse, multiple genocides, and entrenched fascism, happiness seems disingenuous at best. A circumstantial emotion, happiness is incompatible with suffering. But joy isn’t. Joy promotes agency. It requires my consent, my participation, my continuous choices toward gratitude and presence even and especially during times of hardship. It is despondence that triggers and substantiates my spiritual practices. My integrity to my values is tested not by the whims of happiness but by the autonomy joy requires of me. Happiness is like the artificial glee of my drunken stupors that only ever boomeranged back into shame. Joy, on the other hand, is the delight I seek out with sober eyes and an overly sweet mocktail in-hand.
Differentiating between joy and happiness is unoriginal. The fresh take here is that I now celebrate the joy I’ve discovered from admitting that happiness is not for Michael. I’m simply a sad and lonely person. And while that may dishearten you, I breathe a sigh of relief just from typing it. Notwithstanding my brain’s chemical makeup, I’m prone to despair. I am chronically dissatisfied with my own company, with my personhood, with the world. It is that feeling of “not-enoughness” that extended my reach toward gin and tonic to tend to my wounds rather than any actual balm. Like divorce, eliminating alcohol from my culinary and emotional diets did not remove that default state of sadness but helped me identify it with clearer vision.
But take no pity on me. I am sad and I am present for it. My perpetual despair signals to me that I am awake to what’s wrong with the world and unsatisfied with the tools we have assembled to resist structural oppression. It opens me to more complex emotions that I approach with compassion and sharper analysis. Instead of masking my depression with booze, I use it to welcome more nuance. And, in any case, I would much rather be sad than numb.
Like having abandoned hope in order to strengthen my abolitionist resolve through love, my relinquishment of happiness empowers me to choose joy. In fact, I believe I can take more credit for the cheer people often associate with my demeanor because I have installed it myself. My smile is sincere but not natural: I DIY’d it. Whereas I used to only dance drunk, now I manually break down my inhibitions and get out on the floor. And, admittedly, like all the furniture in my house that I built with my hands, I’m proud of myself for that.
This week marks four years of recovery. It’s peculiar to celebrate something I’m not doing, to commemorate an absence. But, of course, recovery is barely about alcohol at all; it’s about how I’m enjoying more agency in my story. It’s about tending to the roots of my mental-health needs, feeling my feelings, and staying awake. It’s about befriending my sadness through joy.
To be sure, my mother was right to discourage me from setting my life course in the direction of happiness. It is a faulty navigational guide. But neither is joy my north star. Liberation is. Including the liberation from anyone’s expectations to be happy.
