I had an English teacher in high school. She was...complicated. Something about her own internal life, that I have yet to figure out despite the time and distance away from my experience of her, made her unimaginably manipulative and cruel towards almost all of us. She was also a very good English teacher, breaking down the essence of Dickens, Shakespeare and Nehru and their works. (Conflict is drama. See, I remember)
This widely reviled human being once sat me down to tell me that my whole personality at that time in my life (I was 15 and my father had very recently shuffled off this mortal coil in spectacular fashion) could be summed up by E.E Cummings.
"(I do not know what is it about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands"
Me, I personally prefer the desperate romanticism of Donne (When thou sigh'st, though sigh'st not the wind) and Barrett Browning (I love thee to the level every day's most quiet need) or the maudlin stoicism of Whitman (O the bleeding drops of red).
She said it and then quickly moved on, yet another in a series of manipulations designed to keep us all paralyzed in uncertainty and fear, so I never quite understood what she meant.
In particular, she quoted the last line of the little couplet to me: Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.
In the context, I took it to mean that she thought I asked for too little from the world, that I was hesitant to claim my portion of joy from the universe.
Older and less inclined to blame all my problems on one thorn in my side (the aforementioned evil educator), I am left to ponder this. I don't think it is that I believe I am less deserving of happiness than any other person around me. I think there are greater complexities at play here.
I've said this before, I have been the supporting player in the story of other people's lives. My best friend (it seems odd to still call her that given that we've spoken thrice in 2013, but that is what she is to me) lived a life at an 11. Her life was always more painful, dramatic, unhappy and exciting always. Worse things than most people can imagine have happened to her. Handsome, smart men will suddenly and completely fall in love with her. Even though she hardly socializes, when she goes out, people cannot seem to get enough of her. She is thought of fondly by most. And she spent a lot of time being in an on-again-off-again epic love story with our other childhood best friend (history has revealed him to be a Grade A asshole who I will spit on if ever I have the misfortune of running into him again).
So somehow, at absolutely nobody else's urging, I slotted myself into the role of the quirky best friend. The Cristina to her Meredith, not even the main player in my own bloody life. If there is any fault to be had here, it can be laid entirely at my doorstep. But I don't think there is any blame to go around; life turns out like this all the time. Not everyone is happy and well-adjusted.
My larger point is this: I just don't think that life works in a way where you have a certain amount of happiness allotted to you and you just have to reach out and grab it.
Rather, it turns out, that happiness is what you make of it. Whether it is being married to Brad Pitt and winning a Nobel Prize, or it is having a child and living the same small town where you grew up, happiness is a skill. You learn how to be happy, how to allow the fall of good fortune to add another hour.
This is the skill that still eludes me. I do not know yet how to be happy. And I 'm not certain that I will ever actually learn. After all, Life Sucks and Then You Die. That's the motto, the credo, the mantra to get through life that I have always employed.
So, here's the thing. I look at other people's Facebook pages and their blogs. I see their photo albums and vacation messages and I think, I don't know how to do that, how to be like that. There's something wrong with me, right?
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