Rejoice though you have considered all the facts

happy birthday to my first book

Three years ago today my first book Aggressively Happy: a realist’s guide to believing in the goodness of life was released. To celebrate, today I share part of the opening chapter.

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

It was December 31, 6:45 a.m. My roommate was still fast asleep, the covers pulled just over her head rising and falling to the rhythm of her deep breaths. I sat in my bed with a warm cup of tea, a candle lit, utterly happy. I have always loved the stillness before the world is awake, when there is silence enough to hear the murmurs of your own hopes and desires more clearly. That morning I had a purpose: to prepare for the new year. As I sipped my tea, I perused the past year in my mind like I was flipping through a picture book, treasuring all the good things, the happy memories I had made, moments of growth. There had been difficulties, yes, but they seemed so outweighed by goodness. As my mug radiated heat through my fingertips, my heart warmed with gratitude. I felt a deep, palpable peace. From this stillness, a message came to my heart.

This year will be hard. You will suffer. The people you love will suffer. Prepare yourself.

I paused and opened my eyes. That is probably the general anxiety disorder speaking, I thought. I am accustomed to a persistent sense of impending doom and to intrusive images of all the things that could go wrong, from broken plates to mis-sent emails, to crushed limbs, to global nuclear catastrophe. All in a day’s dread! I read an article recently that found that a large portion of adults diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and OCD are of Scotch-Irish heritage. Perhaps it was centuries of rain pelting sardonic gloom into our genetic code, or a history of familial conflict with our self-righteous brother, England. Whatever the reason, the Clarksons have not bucked the trend. My dad’s side came from Edinburgh, and my mom’s from Belfast. If God had wanted to make us serene, God could have made us Finnish! (Finland has repeatedly won the “most happy country in the world” award.) I’ve often prepared a small speech in my mind for my future spouse about the high likelihood of our children inheriting mental illness: Dear, I’m bringing great hair, bad knees, and clinical depression to the table. But would Yeats, Heaney, and Hopkins have written such beautiful poetry if they hadn’t been so sad? Despite very little sign of a blossoming career in poetry, I comfort myself with these thoughts.

So my first inclination was to call the doom-and-gloom voice in my head an intrusive thought, have a bite of something with protein in it, do some breathing exercises, and carry on reveling in the nearly perfect morning. Slightly agitated, I closed my eyes, attempting to reclaim tranquility. But the message came again, as clear as if my roommate, Elena, had emerged from her cocoon of slumber to dictate the message herself:

This year will be hard. You will suffer. The people you love will suffer. Prepare yourself.

It was like I’d paused a song, which now resumed at a slightly louder volume. I shook my head again, hoping the thought might trickle out my left ear like a tablespoon of presumptuous pool water from the college gym. But with one last burst of urgency, I felt it to be undeniably true.

The year would be hard. I would suffer. I needed to be prepared.

This time I listened. I knew in my gut that this was not the voice of fear or anxiety. It was not angry; I was not being punished. It was the voice of my mom calling me to let me know there’s traffic ahead, and to leave a little early. It was the voice of a friend tipping me off to the high expectations of a difficult professor. It was the voice of a doctor, about to draw blood, two seconds before the needle went in.

***

I didn’t tell anyone about my omen. I’m really not one for direct messages from God. I have, from time to time, wished to hear an audible voice from heaven announcing definitively that God exists, or telling me who to marry or where to go to grad school. But, alas! I am subject, like most other people, to the vagaries of prayer, of belief, of faith. Truth be told, I have often doubted those who seem to have God’s private phone number. It just doesn’t seem realistic to say God told you where to park, and I think it would be better to tell the boy you’re just not that into him rather than that God told you to break up with him (now you’ve heaped both divine and romantic disapproval on him, poor lad). For me, prayer is usually more about clearing away the clamor of life and the urgency of my insecurities so I can hear the steady, calm voice of wisdom humming beneath it all. That is why this experience was so strange. It had a conspiracy theorist, street preacher vibe to it. I felt almost embarrassed. And when I didn’t feel embarrassed, I felt a bit annoyed. For twenty-odd years my call had gone to voicemail, and all at once I got a message from an unlisted number with a foreboding voice at the other end telling me I was going to suffer.

So, I told no one and went about my business, quietly waiting for the shoe to drop. And it did.

It dishonors a sorrow to tell it to too many people, I think, and it was not entirely my own sorrow to tell, so I hope you will excuse me if I do not share the particulars here. It is enough to say that it was crushing, that it went on and on, that there could be no happy ending. And yet, with the great grief of it clawing for my total attention, I somehow managed to graduate from college, get into Oxford and Yale for courses in religion and literature, and to turn them both down. I had tried and tried to talk myself into saying yes to one of the opportunities—but I could not. The more I prayed about it, and sought that quiet voice, the more it evaded me. I could not be at peace about them, so I turned them down, half convinced it was what God wanted me to do and half convinced I was insane for turning down the best opportunities I might ever have.

More than anything, I was just bone tired. When I was honest with myself, I feared, as fragile as I was, that if I had gone I would have splintered, leaked, and failed. I see now that there was a wisdom in my hesitancy, but at the time all I could feel was that I was stupid for turning down two dream opportunities. I felt that I was a coward or a fool, or very possibly both. I moved home to work and save money and get my bearings. I was so exhausted from the disappointment and sadness of it all that I was barely able to be pleasant. I began to feel that I was a drain to everyone around me. Not that there were many people around me because I was in that strange position of returning to a place where you had once been a very different person, and feeling oddly disjointed from the people you knew in high school. I avoided the friends I did have because they acted so awkward around me, either conspicuously avoiding any discussion of the Sad Thing, while indicating its presence with a dozen significant looks, or trying to shore up the open-ended pain of it with well-meaning words. For the first time in my life, I thought a lot about dying. I didn’t want to die, exactly. I was just tired of living, tired of being in pain, tired of feeling lost, tired of being a drain to the people around me.

So I threw myself into a handful of unglamorous jobs and tried to be okay. Henry David Thoreau aptly wrote that “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,”^[1] and I was quietly desperate. I grew to hate the silence of early mornings. With nothing to distract me, my sadness and my failures would visit me. I tried to avoid their gazes, but when there was no one else in the room, I couldn’t help but acknowledge their persistent presence, their unflinching glares. The quiet mornings that were once a balm to my soul now felt like a poorly fitting shoe chafing a raw blister, opening an old wound again and again.

One of my unglamorous jobs was working at a local coffee shop. I enjoyed the intense physicality of this job and the constant social interaction, which helpfully distracted me and kept me from wallowing. One morning, I rolled out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to open the shop. The temperature had fallen below zero, and I shivered as I clumsily unlocked the door to my car. It groaned in indignation as I sat down and sputtered into life resentfully when I turned the keys. I plugged in my iPhone and put a playlist on shuffle, hoping some female folk music would wake me up gently.

As I turned out of my neighborhood, I thought of that December morning almost a year before. Jealousy, yes it was jealousy, of my past self for having access to such uncomplicated happiness and peace seized my chest. I felt like I had been a better person before, and sorrow had made something small and brittle of me. My own face seemed oddly unfamiliar as I caught sight of my care-weary eyes in the rearview mirror. Who was that? Could she ever be happy again? Feel lightness?

As I crested a hill, a mountain vista greeted me, beckoning my eyes away from the rearview mirror. The silhouettes of the peaks loomed immense in the azure sky. A hint of pink, so faint it almost seemed like wishful thinking, peered over the mountains and breathed purple into the horizon. I felt thankful for a moment that even if I was miserable, the world went on being beautiful. Suddenly, the lyrics from the song I was listening to caught my ears:

And there’s no making cases

For getting out or trading places

And there’s no turning back

You are here.^[2]

When I arrived at the coffee shop, I left my car running and watched as the sun cast its eastward rays on the mountainside. The rose hues of morning were no longer bashful but illuminating the mountain, splashing each cloud with technicolor confidence. Millions of particles of frost sparkled on the asphalt of the parking lot in mundane glory. I listened to the song again.

When something, a song or a sunrise, pierces you straight to the heart, it’s hard to put it into words. Perhaps this is why the great prophets in holy texts always sound so frantic trying to explain their spiritual experiences. “It was like a bird! It was on fire! The smoke filled the whole temple, which was also the universe!” Sometimes, moments of transcendent beauty can effect a transformation so complete that we’re left bereft of words. We know something has changed, but how can we explain it? Without it sounding smaller and somehow less wonderful than it was?

But I will try.

Something in the alchemy of the sunrise and the gently chiding lyrics began a new thing in me. It wasn’t a life lesson or a piece of great advice, it was a realization, an epiphany: this is life, the beauty and the pain together. A glorious sunrise coexistent with deep emotional pain, the utter brokenness of the world. One doesn’t make the other untrue. This is always the bargain. If you get one, you get the other. And in that realization, I was offered a choice: Can you say yes to this? To life as it is? Will you live this beautiful, painful life?

There’s no making cases . . . you are here.

That day, I decided to live. I mean this in two ways. The first is that I stopped thinking about dying. I decided that whatever came, it was my job to see this one strange and wonderful life through to the very end. Where I once cherished a jealousy of my idealized past self, I began to develop a healthy amount of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) on my future life. I began to think of all the sunrises I hadn’t seen, all the huevos rancheros I hadn’t eaten, the hands I hadn’t held, the work I hadn’t done. When I think back on it now, I feel an almost wild relief. I wish I could take my past self, hold her face in my hands, and tell her all the wonderful things I would have missed if I’d given up on life: the birth of my first niece (named for me—Lilian Joy), moving to Scotland, falling in love with a good man, making some of the best friendships of my life, discovering the immense gratification of bread baking and Dutch ovens, getting to teach bright-eyed freshmen, and many, many sunsets.

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Introduction: Decide to Live

^[1] Henry David Thoreau, Walden Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1854, 1882), 15.

^[2] Wailin’ Jennys, “You Are Here,” track 12, Bright Morning Stars, Red House, 2011, MP3.