maybe you should write a poem about grace

When I was in the thick of it — brambles in my face, the path before me imperceptible, the night full of terrors — the people in my life, the people closest to me, would often say to me, “Your life is good. You have everything. You should be happy.” Rationally, I knew that they were right. I did have everything. I had everything that I had ever wanted, everything I had worked for. And yet, I couldn’t feel it anywhere — not in my body, not in my heart, not in my estimation of a soul. None of these reassurances or rationalizations reverberated within me. None of it meant anything to me.

Under the American religion of individualism, unhappiness becomes a personal, moral failing. The right to the pursuit of happiness, so generously bestowed upon us by privileged men at the apexes of success and significance, undermines the complexities of what it actually means to pursue happiness — or what happiness even is. Centuries later, this oversimplification continues to be perpetuated in our culture, in our media, in our self-help books. The belief that you can achieve anything — including happiness — if you “put your mind to it” is persistent and pervasive (“when there’s a will, there’s a way,” “do, do not try. there is no try”).

There is nowhere that this is more entrenched than in the immigrant psyche. As a first-generation immigrant, my childhood can be defined by the word, 忍, or “endure,” (followed closely by the phrase, “because I said so”). If you want something, work for it. Then, work harder. I was made of skin and bones, water and grit.

Fifteen years later, when I told my mom, in a fit of tears, that I was depressed, she responded first by being incredulous, and then by telling me that I brought it upon myself by choosing to be nomadic for the past year — “what did you expect with all this instability?”

The rhetoric of individual responsibility, echoing the parable of the American Dream, is an illusion. It holds individuals responsible for the outcomes of their lives, without accounting for the inextricable influences of societal structures, economic systems, institutional discrimination, biological predispositions — never mind “metaphysical mutations” like the rise of Christianity and modern science. Though there is a lot we don’t understand about happiness — especially when it comes to our own — we’ve made every effort to study it. Research from 2005 posits that happiness is 10% determined by “life circumstances” and 50% determined by genetics; research from 2016 suggests that the heritability of happiness amounts 70 to 80 percent. It does appear, anecdotally, that there’s a ceiling to the influence of “life circumstances” — our dearest idols, celebrities and politicians, seem no less immune to depression than mere mortals.

Happiness, is seems, is rarely a choice. Beyond inaccurate, beyond “problematic,” it’s harmful for us to perpetuate this collective delusion that a person can choose to be happy and then is; that happiness is an individual, and personal, responsibility; that an unhappy person is culpable for their own unhappiness.

Maybe happiness isn’t something we can “will,” “do,” “make happen.” Maybe you can climb all the ladders, amass all the rewards along the ascent, fulfill all your dreams and desires, and still, happiness might elude you. Maybe it’s human/only human/essentially human to find existential dread, adjustment disorders, loss and heartbreak, in the pursuit of happiness. And maybe the only thing to do then, now, is to meet yourself where you are with grace. I think about this a lot. “Maybe you should write about grace,” a paraphrase of this first line from a Robert Haas poem, Faint Music (h/t Jared for sending this to me <3):

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days—
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,   
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

This is not to say that there is nothing you can do to get closer to happiness. I think there is a time to turn to work, a time for effort and energy; but, I think, grace comes first. Grace for yourself, on your inevitable bad days, and for the sharp shape that the world has taken, for the way living came into focus, the way your faraway visions fell away as you grew older. First, grace; then, faith that there will be better days. Faith that then there will be singing. The last stanza of the poem (line break my own):

It’s not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.   
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain

it must sometimes make a kind of singing.

And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.