Let's Face It. Neither Of Us Are Lookers
Living Happy
When I was little until now, I spent almost all my time trying to be a nice person. It’s always been like this; I kid you not. Like in fifth grade I was voted MOST COURTEOUS like that was some kind of honor, right?
Carrie is polite.
Carrie is courteous.
Carrie is word-of-the day worthy.
But it wasn’t what I wanted to be. I wanted to be Smartest or Prettiest or Class Clown or Most Athletic even though Most Athletic is something I could never be since I have zero hand-eye coordination. This is because I don’t really use my left eye to see. I had glasses when I was one year old and kept them all the way until fifth grade when I prayed to God every night to not have to have glasses in middle school.
There was this stupid Dorothy Parker quote that says, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and that quote was like the word of God to me. I knew I would always be most courteous and not real superlative worthy unless I actually got rid of those glasses.
So I prayed.
At the doctor’s office, I sat in the chair and stared at the eye chart. It was all on my right eye, I knew. It had to perform at 100 % to get rid of those damn glasses.
The doctor said, “Can you read this line?”
And I said, “E.”
And he’s said, “Can you read this line?”
And I said, “T.O.Z.”
He makes an interesting noise, like he’s impressed. “Go down as low as you can. Just keep reading each line. Start at the top. How about that?”
The bit of his eye machine that I have no name for was cold against the bottom of my chin. “Okay.” I took a deep breath and started from the top. “E F P T P Z L P E D.”
I went on and on. I could see them all.
That was it, I thought. My life was forever happy. I could see with my right eye well enough to get rid of my glasses. Miracles happened. One had happened to me.
Harvard professor, Arthur Brooks says in the Managing Happiness class, “Reducing happiness to the simplest possible terms, happiness equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning.”
He goes on to say,
“Enjoyment is related to pleasure, but it isn't the same thing. It involves things that give you pleasure, plus a measure of elevation or education. So for example, alcohol might give you a pleasure but understanding good wine can give you enjoyment.
And while music can bring pleasure, real enjoyment comes from learning about good music.”
He goes on to say that satisfaction isn’t about “having what you want.”
We all know people who are intensely lucky and have exactly what they want but are still unsatisfied and people who are the opposite.
“That's because your satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want. No matter how much you have, if you want everything, you will have a very hard time being satisfied. You will learn that the right way to balance this equation is to work on reducing the denominator, your wants, not maximizing the numerator, your haves. In other words, satisfaction comes not from having what you want, but wanting what you have.”
Something inside of me often balks at this because in a world of such great economic inequality, there’s a certain aspect of “making do” that happens here that doesn’t speak to people lacking good shelter and clean water and food stability or people in constant danger of violence and hate.
There are aspects of it that are lovely though.
And his happiness equation is also about life’s value and meaning. He says:
“People tend to get the greatest sense of their life's meaning when they have faced hardship.
Of course, these are things we typically avoid because they're associated with unhappiness, not happiness. But we need them to find life's meaning. And we need meaning for true happiness.
So in a paradoxical way, happiness requires some amount of unhappiness.”
Sadly, the magical return of my eyesight didn’t make me magically popular as one boy reminded me at a sixth-grade dance at St Joseph’s the one Catholic church in our town. We had one Catholic church, which was where some of the Irish and French Canadian kids go. We had one Protestant church, which was Presbyterian. That was it in town. For all other religions, you had to head into Manchester, the city.
I secretly wanted to be Catholic because I loved how all the Catholic kids banned together and whine about going to religious classes on Wednesday nights and church on Sunday mornings. They hated CCD. They moaned about being altar boys and having to light candles and stuff. I thought this seemed amazing – like this secret society of awesomeness. Plus, Catholics had miracles.
I wanted to be one of them so badly.
I wanted to belong, you know?
Like my older brother and sister? They are 14 and 15 years older than I am, which basically meant back then that they were ancient. And back in sixth grade, they were all the way adult. My sister had babies. My brother had a wife. My parents divorced when I was little so it was like I didn’t even grow up in the same family.
I wanted to belong to something, someone, somehow. To me, belonging equated with worth. If I belonged, I would have worth.
So, when that boy, who I am now Facebook friends with, slow danced with me three times in a row at the CCD dance, I felt like I might actually belong. The magic of my right eye’s resurrection had made me something special.
But then he pulled away from me and said, “Carrie, let’s face it. Neither of us are lookers. So we might as well make do with each other.”
I stepped out of his arms and I said one word, “What?”
“I’m saying … I’m saying … We’re not tens so we might as well make do.”
Everything inside of me crumpled, and I cried and I ran away and hid in the bathroom. I didn’t come out even when his mom, a freaking chaperone, came in to check on me. I didn’t come out until there wasn’t any music playing and I couldn’t hear many voices laughing, just the scraping of moms voices as they put away a metal table that had held snacks and punch.
Wrenching open the bathroom door, I ran out to where my mom’s old Chevy MonteCarlo was waiting in the parking lot, wrenching open the door of our car, too, and slamming myself into the seat.
Her smile went into the anger place where her lips were just straight lines. “What is it?”
I blurted out what that boy said. With my mother, there was no pretending something bad hadn’t happened. There were no secrets unless they were hers.
“That bastard,” she murmured and smashed the hot end of her cigarette into the ashtray. The embers flickered and died.
“I’m ugly.” I sobbed that out.
She somehow understood what I was saying. “You aren’t ugly. That boy is ugly. His heart is ugly. He was working some line. Boys do that. Idiot men do that. You can’t fall for that.”
But I knew in my heart that my mom was lying. I was ugly. I had to be.
And the thing is, no matter how many times I’ve heard people tell me I’m not, heard boys and girls call me cute or beautiful or lovely or pretty, I’d never believed them. That boy’s words are what I hear in my head, over and over again.
That’s why even though I agree with Brooks’s assertions about happiness, I think there’s another couple of pieces he doesn’t talk about here.
Your life can have meaning. You can have a gorgeous support network. You can have faith and philosophy and do good work, happy parents. But you also have to build up something inside of yourself, something that doesn’t quake when someone or society tells you to make do, when someone or society tells you that you aren’t a looker or that you’re stupid or evil or worthless or less than.
Happiness also comes from a belief in yourself that doesn’t shake when you are faced with things that you don’t want to hear.
I’m not saying that we should all follow Epicurus and become Epicureans and think that all that it takes to be happy and have a good life is to be free of mental disturbance and absent of pain (ataraxia and aponia), but it’s okay to build yourself up so that others can’t drag you down and it’s really great if we can all remember to not build ourselves up by crushing the backs and egos of others.
We’re all in this together, lookers or not. :)
A ROUND UP OF LIVING HAPPY RESOURCES YOU MIGHT WANT TO CHECK OUT!
Our paid subscriber post all about the Happiness Portfolio.
Nap Like An Ancient Warrior For Brain Health, which was last week’s podcast.
A cool book to check out is The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Subtitle: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy.
https://medium.com/stoicism-philosophy-as-a-way-of-life/happiness-and-stoicism-411cf7c40664
Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key
Derren Brown’s Happy
Ronald Dworkin Justice for Hedgehogs.