Why Can’t I Feel Happy Anymore?
By: A. Nonymous
Tags: Grief, Happiness, Middle Age, Loneliness, Mental Health

Why Can’t I Feel Happy Anymore?

Photo by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash

When you look back on the past seven years and realize that you haven’t been able to experience any happy feelings for more than a few hours at a time, obviously you have to wonder: What the heck is the problem?

I have to qualify this by saying that a couple of bizarre occurrences that only lasted a few months to a few days, did bring me wild and wonderful happiness. (Love has a way of doing that.)

But other than that, I have lived in a miserable happiness-desert ever since my husband passed away seven years ago.

I never used to be this way. I remember, after being mostly miserable as a kid because of clashes with my mentally ill mother at home and with cruel classmates at school, feeling at least somewhat better as a teen, because college loomed as a light at the end of the tunnel.

College was okay, professional school was so tough it was another dark cloud, but once I was in my twenties I found myself a fairly optimistic person. Most days I was happy to get up and go in the morning, and my thirties and early forties I have to say were very happy.

Why was that?

In my thirties, I was discovering, after a lifetime of hating my body and struggling with puritanical attitudes from childhood, that I actually could find someone who would date me even though I was overweight. I actually could throw over Momma’s attitudes and what she would see me do, and have a sexual partner — the way everyone else I knew had been doing since they left home for college.

A wild sense of freedom from the shackles of home and establishing your own sexual identity will make you happy.

That guy dumped me hard on my ass … but two weeks later, the wonderful guy I would eventually marry asked me out. That was the beginning of eleven years of happiness for me.

Years before, struggling in my career, I thought back to how English teachers had always praised my writing ability, and I planned an escape.

Uh-huh … don’t laugh …

Someday I would be a Bestselling Novelist.

It looked for a while as if I were on the right track. My late husband and I met in a writer’s group that saw several of its members published in magazines, newspapers, and traditional publishing. We had a Missouri Historical Novel Award winner, and my own husband had a Writers of the Future honorable mention, a Josiah Bancroft award, and shortlisted for the Shamus Award and the Great Lakes Book Award.

It seemed like I was in good company. I had my first idea for an original novel, not a fan fic. My husband was helping me, and I helped him with his. (When you’re a man in your sixties trying to write first person as a twenty-year-old girl, you really need a female perspective!)

I assigned him Women Who Love Too Much as reading material, and watching his police movies and PI shows sparked off lively discussions I needed for the police procedural stories I planned. I eventually had to put the stories aside because the care of two elderly, handicapped relatives fell into my lap, and I was distressed about that. Very distressed.

But, even so, for the first time I finally felt normal. Like everyone else, I finally had a family and a home. A healthy home, where nobody was mentally ill, nobody carped and complained about other people all the time, we actually talked out problems instead of blaming each other, and we absolutely adored each other.

We were the kind of couple who drove separate cars to a restaurant for breakfast together before work, who hugged and kissed goodbye in the middle of the restaurant, and everybody around us said, “Aww!” And we still were, right through my husband’s sudden diagnosis of brain cancer, and his death a little over two years later.

Even after he passed away, I still expected to be happy. Freed from the burden of caregiving, I dreamed about resurrecting the novel I had put away a year and a half ago, and publishing it. I thought about the new people I might meet and the new relationship I might have.

I expected a bright future.

Expecting a bright future isn’t always the best idea. As I joined new Meetup groups yet failed to find even a single kindred spirit, joined a second writer’s group and debuted a second novel there only to find that no one was impressed, got my heart badly, badly broken, and then joined Medium and bombed …

… my spirits just sank lower …

… and lower …

… and lower.

Jonathan Rauch, in discussing why life gets better after 50, tells us that midlife is so bad because we paint excessively rosy pictures in our twenties and thirties, and then realize during our forties that we really did expect far too much. Difficulties hit us that were much harder than we ever expected … and then we realize that we are growing old.

What’s ahead, I often ask myself, other than increasing infirmity, aloneness, and then the nursing home?

’Cause there sure ain’t nothing else peeking over this horizon, I can tell you that.

Rauch tells us that, because the unrealistic hopes of our youth have been so horribly dashed, and this culture sees old age as the extreme end of horrible, we start to paint pictures of our future, from the low point of about 45, that look darker than thunderclouds.

But then, for most of us, he writes, we discover the future really doesn’t turn out that badly, and in fact, is much better than we thought. Then we’re unexpectedly happy about that, and that feeds more happiness, and so on. The elderly, he writes, are happy people on the whole.

So, what’s wrong with me? Did the whole curve get shifted to the right, so I’m just getting the very same at later ages than I expect? Where is the light on the horizon?

Because, I have to tell you, I don’t expect much at all.

After the last romance broke up and I saw all that was wrong with me in that one, I really have no idea what I even want in a male companion anymore, and I sure as fuck haven’t got a clue where to find one in these days of covid-19. My body is aging and my libido has crashed. Maybe I don’t need a man anymore anyhow.

I don’t know where to find kindred spirits, either. My second writer’s group turned out to be full of Trumpists with really repellent attitudes, and I’m not sure I need a writer’s group anymore, anyway.

When you start to put your writing out there, and the collective response to it is one big yawn, that’s when you realize your schoolteachers were wrong, and that the estimation you put on your own abilities, way back from childhood, wasn’t realistic at all.

When you put your work on Wattpad and you can’t even give it away, sorry, but you aren’t going to be selling it, either.

From this point in my life, the future looks like a long, slow slide down.

I am brokenhearted, and I don’t know how to be happy again.

But, look at how I was happy before:

Yes, I had a happy relationship, but I knew that with a 21-year age difference, it wasn’t going to last forever. Unless you’re John and Alicia Nash (A Beautiful Mind), who passed away together in a car accident the day after he won the Abel Prize, no relationship lasts forever.

I was basing happiness on achievement. And achievement means feeling superior to everyone else. Gee, where’d I learn to do that?

If I am saying that unless and until there’s some exterior proof that I’m better than other people in some way (My relationship’s better! I wrote a bestseller!), I can’t be happy … man. I’m no better than Donald Trump.

Seems like these items need to be erased from my personality like errant marks on a math test. And as soon as I can do it, too. Aren’t they really just hubris and false pride?

I saw my oldest relatives end their days in a nursing home. Because of the constraints of modern society in requiring people to work so hard to retire educational and medical debt, I had to put them there. They didn’t seem particularly happy.

And I have to ask myself, So what if I did pen a bestseller, anyway? Wouldn’t I just end up right back where I am now, cuddled on the couch, enjoying this wonderful fish-and-grits thing I ordered on Grubhub, tapping away again at yet another introspective thing that nobody’s going to read?

The only thing that’s real is the brief pleasure I feel in writing it, and the evanescent glow of accomplishment when I hit that little green rectangle: Publish.

That’s the only thing that’s real. And, in the absences of relationship and of worldly success, that’s the only thing I have.

If I have enough marbles, enough eyesight, and enough mobility in my hands to still do this at 90 in the nursing home, that’s all I will have then, too.

Shouldn’t I have always defined happiness like that, then? Because that is the only happiness that, absent getting a brain disease myself, I will never lose.

The real problem for me is that it seems like so much less than what I dreamed of in my teens, twenties, and thirties. And what happened in my early forties made it look like I was going to have these things.

BLAM! Surprise!!

But, happiness really is going back to the little things. And truly enjoying those little things, over and over and over and over.

Maybe everything got taken away from me in my life so I could notice that.

When we’re sitting in the nursing home at 90, and we can look out a window and truly enjoy seeing a hummingbird outside or ducks in the yard, and we can feel happy, that’s all we really need.

Especially if we can still type out a few words or a poem about it. Or we retain the ability to draw or paint a picture of what we’ve seen.

Why not get good at that now?

Maybe my life’s been engineered for me to learn this lesson.

It’s not like I’ve got anything else to do.