Look Back In Anger...Wait, what? Happiness?

Yes, actually.

Sometimes the years don’t change but the person does. I don’t know. For someone who takes stock of his life on a near daily basis — this is bad for you, by the way, as many professionals have told me — you can imagine how seriously I take a new year while looking back at the last one. I can remember a lot of times thinking, “Well, that was a shit year.” I’d put 2020 among the worst — many of us do — and yet, was it? I got closer to my partner in the lockdown, even though there was no real assumption or need on either of our parts to improve that area. Most important, in a year without vaccines everyone in my family survived. That, to put it bluntly, is a huge fucking win.

I still constantly sing this “low-key fuck 2020 song” (“F2020) to this day from Avenue Beat (it was even on my New Year’s playlist even though it’s now seemingly from a different era) and, yes, I laugh when they say can’t wait for 2021, another anecdotally shit year:

Barring any year when a loved one (or animal) dies, aren’t all years basically good? Even if they are kind of periodically insane and problematic? Maybe I’m just having a better perspective? I say that and I still thought 2021 could kiss my ass — and I had a salary then! I had plenty of good times in 2021 and then yelled and kicked at it in fury on New Year’s Eve like it was a dying witch.

Despite a number of difficult times in 2022, I still knew as I tracked it that I was, in totality, this weird thing — happy.

Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash

Memories fade, but I can’t remember a ton of years where I’ve said, “What a great year.” Or, “X year was really good to me.” Maybe that’s my nature? Because I’ve had great years, looking back. Shit years, too. But lots of great years. Are certain people more hard-wired to remember the bad times? I know a lot of critics (not me) who seem to struggle to write really positive reviews but can blow up a series with glamorous grammatical glee. (Side note: There are all too many critics who can’t seem to criticize anything that isn’t patently, irrefutably terrible. Which, of course, makes them terrible critics.)

But I know I’m not all negative. Everybody has some duality in them, yes? I’m actually astonishingly positive in my daily life compared to, say, the misanthropic college years as only one vague example. I’m happier as I get older — even though I hate getting older and refuse to talk much about it or acknowledge anything of the sort. I’m just saying there’s been some personal growth through the years, as there should have been. But I am absolutely not a glass-half-full person — that’s my partner’s genetic make up. I was raised and nearly ruined with Catholic guilt, took to the glum joy (yes) of punk rock and went to college to become a cynical journalist (then spent my professional life as a critic). Not too hard to see the path there, people.

Pain in the ass? Gotta be ass cancer. Ambitious plans? This is gonna end badly. Something truly great happens? Oh, then the plane is definitely going down.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to break that pattern. So as 2022 unrolled, I was thinking this for the vast majority: I’m happy in this moment.

Who had I become?

Maybe it’s just practicing what I preach? Maybe it’s acknowledging out loud what I — Catholic guilt alert — kept tamped down in the past? Even in the darkest days I always tried to remember that health and happiness were the most important things in life. When depression hit or anxiety overwhelmed, I always had the same meditative thought: “Keep the lighthouse in sight.”

I think in 2022 I bought into all of that more grandly. Or, can’t rule it out — maybe I was just happier?

Look, I wrote a whole TV series about happiness and existentialism and then the pandemic hit — which is, if you think about it, kind of funny. It’s really difficult, as I’ve mentioned before, to pitch a series about happiness and existentialism. It’s vague. I boiled one explanation about the main character down to something I completely understand intellectually and I’m proud of — that his wasn’t an A to B (or G, if you prefer) story. It was an A to A story. He’s happy where he is, with what he has. It’s everybody else who is disappointed that he doesn’t want more, doesn’t have more; so much potential untapped because he’s happy as is. Which means that the story is really about how those around him react; he necessitates that they focus on their own unhappiness, no matter how tiny.

No conscious part of that was about me. I want everything. And then more of something else. Which any good therapist will tell you is at the root of the problem when it comes to happiness. It’s not that you can’t ever experience it — but the fleeting element will always be there (leading to more unhappiness, one assumes). You might recall this as the oft-annoying-in-its-accuracy part of the axiom, “it’s the journey, not the destination.”

I don’t think I ended up, in 2022, being the character I wrote in 2019 and parts of 2021. He’s happy as is and doesn’t seem to want anything. I sure as shit wanted that show to get picked up. And then the next one I wrote. And the one that’s out there now.

But I got better at truly appreciating what I had. And along the way I got things I thought were out of reach (let’s just say lending institutions are not really designed to help people who are self-employed and whose salaries have, you know, fallen horrifyingly over a cliff, even if that’s just optimistically temporary). But that loan happened, which made the Portland place happen. This Substack started to take off. I’m getting booted out of my Oakland flat but they had to pay to do it and that (kind of hilariously) turned into a mini-salary that helped me stay in Oakland (the New Year’s Pet Nat bubbles were cracked over that, I can tell you).

I’m healthy. I’m keeping the lighthouse in sight. So are my loved ones.

There were, in 2022, lots of down times, there are in any year. There were doubts and despair, sadness, crying, worry, etc.; but everybody has that — every year of every life has that; and last year, like most years, I managed it well enough. Maybe the difference was marinating a little longer in the gratitude of those things, those times, those people, that make you happy.