Screw the silver lining
On feminism and happiness
At first, the message I wanted to offer today sounded simple: It’s okay to be happy right now, in the midst of a terrifying election process, wars … you know the list. Being sad, angry, anxious, and unhappy all the time doesn’t help anything.
My desire to write this post came from so many conversations with friends who seem to feel the weight of the world all the time. And that pressure amplifies any ongoing mental health issues, as well as the impact of systemic racism, misogyny, ableism, etc.
Then, I studied feminist takes on happiness and learned how it’s been used as a tool of oppression. And what I wanted to share got more complicated.
Here’s where I stand today:
It’s okay to be happy as long as your happiness is not enabled by the willful denial of the suffering of others. It’s okay to be happy, but it probably shouldn’t be your ultimate goal. It’s okay to be the cause of other’s unhappiness when you’re opening their eyes to injustice. You have the right to be unhappy—especially in the midst of deep grief and suffering—and no one should make you feel bad about it. But when you’re suffering, seek and hold on to joy, which is different than happiness, because it can be comforting and can instill a sense of meaning and purpose in your life.
In this piece, I’ll break down how I got here.
When Happiness is Oppressive
I recently had lunch with a friend who vented about how people are expected to find the “silver lining” when going through something hard. You can’t just go through something that sucks — it has to be “making you stronger” or have some “blessing in disguise.”
It’s as if there’s a responsibility to be positive.
But why?
Feminist scholars identify different reasons for this. One is that people have a hard time processing difficult emotions and fears, and it’s easier to ignore them. So, being vocal about sitting with them and accepting them forces others to face them, as well, which simply won’t do.
And if your unhappiness or suffering is connected to something unjust, then it opens up a much larger can of worms. If you publicly display your anger, fear, or grief (all of which might be considered unhappy feelings) about abuse, sexism, racism, you’re forcing people to face not only your personal experiences but also the fact that these issues exist in the first place.
You become a killjoy.
The very idea that our first responsibility is to our own happiness is what allows us to look away.
Sara Ahmed
When a society prioritizes positivity and happiness, it often does so by avoiding potential causes for unhappiness. As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed puts it, “the very idea that our first responsibility is to our own happiness is what allows us to look away."
Scholar and poet Audre Lorde faced this societal expectation to be outwardly positive after she underwent a mastectomy in 1978 and was criticized by nurses when she chose not to wear a prosthetic. She was told that she was bringing down the morale of other cancer patients by choosing to display her missing breast.
She wrote about her experiences in The Cancer Journals, a powerful blend of prose and journal entries that any see as the origins of the self-care movement. She writes that a prosthesis was sold to her as a way to hide that anything was different about herself, but it was really a way for patients to avoid the grief and other painful feelings surrounding the loss of one’s breast and facing their mortality.
This is exactly what happens when we are expected to find and present only the positives of our suffering. The breadth of our experiences is invalidated, and we become isolated from others. We can also estrange parts of ourselves from ourselves, as well.
This suppression can have health ramifications. I wrote about physician Gabor Mate’s book The Myth of Normal in which he argues that suppressing emotions and other essential aspects of one’s personality can leave a person prone to chronic illness and disease. It’s actually healthier when you allow a full expression of who you are.
It is easier to demand happiness than to clean up the environment.
Audre Lorde
But not everyone sees it this way. In an op-ed in a medical journal Lorde read at the time, a doctor claimed “that no truly happy person ever gets cancer.”
Quite the opposite of Maté’s findings, there’s another school of thought that a dogged determination to be positive and stress-free is “good for your health.” (Just do a Google search for “happiness + good for your health” to see the wealth of literature on the topic.) And while I’m sure that being happy is good for your blood pressure, I’m even more positive that faking happiness or feeling obligated to always be happy is much, much worse.
Lorde also rejected the sentiment, finding it to not only be victim-blaming (you have cancer because you’re unhappy), but also irresponsible:
This guilt trip which many cancer patients have been led into … does nothing to encourage the mobilization of our psychic defenses against the very real forms of death which surround us. It is easier to demand happiness than to clean up the environment. […] Let us seek ‘joy’ rather than real food and clean air and a saner future on a livable earth! As if happiness alone can protect us from the results of profit-madness.
Because, once again, if we focus on the responsibility to be happy and fault anyone who isn’t, then we can ignore all of the more uncomfortable aspects of our reality.
The Freedom to Be Unhappy
Ahmed proposes we should “claim the freedom to be unhappy” which she defines as “the freedom to deviate from the paths of happiness.”
For instance, for Lorde, in the late 70s, the default path of happiness for breast cancer patients was the use of prosthetics or plastic surgery to hide the effects of cancer. Lorde’s alternative to this was to wear her loss publicly. This opened up new possibilities for Lorde, such as the ability to attract other women who had gone through the same thing and build community.
Another more personal example is how I was conditioned to believe that I would find happiness in the form of a heterosexual marriage. I spent most of my twenties believing that I was unhappy because of my failure to attract a spouse. Over time, I began to open my mind to new possibilities — multiple lovers, queer lovers, accepting and embracing solitude. And while none of these alternatives have always led to “happiness” per se, they have offered me fulfilling relationships, and a deeper sense of self-respect and self-love. They wouldn’t be right for everyone, but they’ve worked for me.
What I’m trying to say is that happiness is often tied to societal scripts that may or may not serve us. And when we break free from these scripts, it might appear as if we’re choosing unhappiness. But really, we’re choosing a path (or paths) of authenticity, honesty, and deeper meaning.
Unhappy is Not the Same as Guilty
So we choose a more authentic or honest path. Or we choose to not look away when others point out the causes of their own unhappiness, many of which are tied to societal injustices and trauma.
When we do this, there’s another impediment to happiness that many of us will face, which is guilt.
Privilege guilt is the guilt you can feel for ways in which your identity or your background afford you a leg up in society: if you’re white, if you’re currently able-bodied, thin, etc.
It’s easy to feel guilty when you see others struggling because of the differences in their identities. And I suspect that privilege guilt might be a factor in the “weight of the world” feeling that some of my friends struggle with.
But this guilt doesn’t nurture equity. In fact, it can do the opposite by fostering a desire to help those “less fortunate.”
Ironically I first remember feeling privilege guilt when I read an essay by James Baldwin in college. But Baldwin himself dismisses the usefulness of guilt in his book Notes of a Native Son:
I’m not interested in anybody’s guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason.
Here Baldwin is calling on white and Black folks to be active allies in a fight for justice. There is no helping someone less fortunate. There’s only fighting together for what is right.
Privilege guilt is a distraction that gets in the way of real work. And while we need to own our privilege and understand how it shapes our perspective, when it’s time to act, it’s more beneficial to focus on the true enemy: systemic oppression and to see anyone who is working for true equity as your ally, not your responsibility.
Seeking Joy Rather than Happiness
I want to be careful here not to paint a grimmer picture than I intended. By claiming that happiness should not be our ultimate goal and that we have the right to be unhappy, I’m not saying we should be satisfied being or staying unhappy.
We have to somehow balance staying aware of and present to our personal suffering and the injustices around us while also finding ways of taking satisfaction and pleasure out of life.
I wonder if my friend who is tired of being asked to find the silver lining of her suffering would feel differently about being asked where she finds joy and pleasure in the midst of it all.
On an episode of Fresh Air, poet Christian Wiman, who spent nearly two decades fighting a rare form of cancer, explained the difference between joy and happiness while in pain:
In my experience, you can have physical pain and still experience joy. Joy can occur in the midst of great suffering. The kind of difference between joy and happiness - we're not happy in the midst of great suffering, but we can still experience these moments of joy.
Similarly, on her podcast, Martha Beck defined happiness as “what you feel when something you do succeeds, or you recover from an illness, or someone you love comes back from far away;” whereas joy is “I am here on an experience-gathering mission, and my soul loves adventure and is not afraid to suffer.”
There’s something more honest and authentic about joy. It doesn’t require you to turn away from anything to experience it. I see this shift from happiness to joy in activist movements that prioritize rest and pleasure and make them essential parts of a justice framework.
So readers, I don’t wish you happiness; I wish you joy. I wish you solidarity in whatever you struggle with — friends and allies who allow you to be authentically where you are and grieve publicly. And I encourage you, in the midst of it all, to pursue tender pleasure wherever you can find it.
Painting by J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons