the habit of being

It’s weird. It’s as if I just woke up one day and realized that everything is fine. I know that isn’t really what happened. In fact, it took an absolutely absurd number of good things happening to me, one after another after another, to get me to even entertain the possibility that maybe my life isn’t awful, that I’m not perpetually stuck in the shithole that was 2002, that my life isn’t Ruined Forever.

But it feels like one day, maybe last week or the week before, maybe yesterday, I just woke up and everything had changed. I can’t say which day it was, because that didn’t happen, and in fact just last week or the week before or yesterday I was crying and feeling terrible. But it’s like that doesn’t even matter, because right now I can look at my life, my whole life as it is, and say: this is good, this is as it should be.

Normally, I can’t see this at all. At most, I can, even from the mud of my self-pity, force myself to admit that at least one thing is going alright: At least I live in New York. At least my boss thinks I’m smart. At least my mother loves me. At least I’m not ill. At least my fish hasn’t died. And my favorite: I am so lonely and so miserable, so damaged and untouchable, but at least I’m not boring. The problem is that I can’t even look at one positive aspect of my life without weighing it against that seemingly unbearable load of all my baggage and problems, such that the good thing seems so tiny and feeble in comparison that it’s no longer worth acknowledging, let alone celebrating, at all.

When I was 11 or 12 or smaller, I really thought depressed people were fascinating. They wrote all the really moving stories and had all the intense feelings and they seemed so honest and so interesting. And I knew I had some of this stuff in me too, so I played it up. I wrote the kind of stories that depressed girls wrote, and I wore the kind of clothes that depressed girls wore. But, somewhere, for years, even as the sad stories started coming true, in the back of my mind I was worried that maybe it was all just pretend. Maybe I was only pretending to suffer so I could be edgy and cool.

But the suffering got worse and worse and at some point I decided there was just no way it couldn’t be real. Not only was it real, it was everything I had. My suffering became who I was and what my art was about and what made me make art in the first place. To know suffering, I thought, was what it meant to really get it in life.

In a lot of ways, I still believe that. I believe that if you can really go deep into what hurts you, you can learn to understand much more than your personal sadness: you can understand why the world is in the mess it’s in, why people sometimes do horrible things, why religions exist, all sorts of things. I fully believe that suffering is the way to compassion, and that compassion is essential.

But now, I also know I wasn’t wrong when I was 11 or 12. This whole notion of worrying about being a “poseur” is something that seems so adolescent, so immature. And it’s supposed to be some triumph when we stop worrying about whether we’re really being who we really are. But maybe that worry is a real insight. Maybe, even now, my suffering is just pretend.

By “pretend” I don’t mean it’s worthless or it’s dishonest or it’s fake. I just mean it’s something I made up. Pretending about sadness really can lead to real sadness. My reality has always been something I made up. I’d like to think that there’s some outside of me reality, some essential truth or whatever, but I don’t really know. Maybe someday I will feel more sure about that. But for today, I’m just going to pretend to be happy instead.

Nothing is really any different. It’s just that I have this amazing job and this warm, supportive family, and I have this healthy body and these brilliant friends and I live in this endlessly fascinating place, surrounded by beauty, everyday, and my mind is capable and flexible and compared to all that, a little pain, even a lot of pain, just doesn’t seem like such a big deal.