Semantics

In college, I had a series of therapy sessions with a doctor who “specialized” in child, adolescent and adult psychology. The text on his business card was very crowded and his office was littered with Legos and puzzles, teen magazines, and a modest collection of mutely-colored Mexican artifacts. Every appointment felt like a 50-minute identity crisis. The doctor had clearly prepared himself for a patient with multiple personalities, someone who signed their checks “Mr. Louis T. Cooperstein” but, some days, answered only to “Baby Louie.” I sought counseling for a largely unremarkable case of depression and anxiety. I’m not sure he knew what to do with me.

Every time I sat on his couch, I had the constant impression that his mind was wandering elsewhere, that he found me a complete and utter bore. As a chronic people-pleaser, I tried my best to engage him. Once I started dropping the names of syndromes and disorders that I had learned in AP Psych in high school, trying to bait him with the chance diagnose something extraordinary. “Maybe I have mild this…or severe that…or advanced something complicated by late on-set something else.” His rare responses were always very critical and eventually I gave up and we sat across from each other in unresolved silence. He gazed out the window, his posture and expression conveying such detachment that I felt like I was the doctor trying to draw in a lost patient.

In what would be our last meeting, I managed to capture his attention with what was fundamentally a dispute about grammar. Our unresolved silence had become so irritating that I began a rambling monologue just to drown out the clock’s audible ticking. I must have started one too many sentences with “My happiness,” because, without warning, the doctor looked at me, inched his chin forward, and poised the tip of his gold pen, which had been folded limply beneath his palm, above his legal pad.

“You say ‘happiness’ as if it’s a thing,” he said in a tone that he may or may not been meant to sound quite so accusatory. He shifted his left leg across his right knee and lowered his jaw onto the heel of his right hand. His movements reminded me of a street performer playing statue, pouring body parts like wet plaster into a pose and holding absolutely still, wordlessly daring passersby to poke him to see if he is made of stone or skin. 

“Well, ‘happiness’ is a noun.”  We bickered for a few moments about whether or not I could I reduce my emotions down to semantics before he poured himself back against the other arm of his chair and resumed indifferent surveillance of the street outside.  Meanwhile, I experienced a brief wave of envy for buskers who paint their bodies bronze and spend their days performing for an audience of fleeting strangers.  If only that would bring me happiness.

According to the OED, the definition of happiness is: The quality or condition of being happy; good fortune or luck in life or in a particular affair; success, prosperity.  This is not the first time I have looked that up.  My conversation with the dour doctor always comes to mind when I find myself defining indefinable things as a means of coping with them.  Linguistically, happiness may be a noun, but what a fleeting, fragile one it is.  It is unfairly elusive.  Like a limb or a muscle, you aren’t aware of its presence until it has been compromised. 

There is one other phrase that I will always associate with happiness—the word itself and all that it represents.  My friend Lily once wrote to me in a letter, “One of the most frustrating things my mom ever said to me was, ‘no one ever guaranteed your happiness.’  Unfortunately, it’s true.”  When I am depressed, truly, deeply unhappy, that seems like the most paralyzing, punishing philosophy, no matter how true it may be.  I can think of a few instances in my childhood when I wailed the patent slogan of outraged little girls, “I never asked to be born!”  There are particularly brutal times when the realization that happiness is not a birthright is enough to make me want to throw that tantrum again. 

But at other times, at most times, I am in that expansive space between desolation and delight.  Then, Lily’s mother’s wise words sound more like a good-natured challenge, even a dare.  Happiness isn’t a promise.  It is something to be achieved.  Perhaps happiness is something that must be exercised, like limbs and muscles.  To get there, to get through both the largely unremarkable doldrums and the singular hardships that everyone endures and achieve happiness, that would be something extraordinary.