It seems to me that we live in a sad world. We live in a world full of people searching for something more, something deeper. You ask people what they need in order to be truly happy, and you often hear the same responses — more money, a better job, less stress, less debt, more time. But the thing is that we can get more money and less stress and a better job and more time, and yet still, I’m not sure we really get any happier.
Our culture abounds with quick fixes for happiness – there’s gambling and drugs and alcohol and pornography. There are cruises and Disney Land and remote retreats and reality tv. Everywhere we go and everywhere we look we are bombarded with messages telling us how we can earn that peace and that contentment and that happiness that eludes us. It’s the job of the advertising world to prove to us that they can fix our brokenness, and all too often, we believe them. After all, what else do we have to believe.
Now that probably all sounds rather pessimistic, I gather. But my observations don’t come from a place of despair but rather of hope.
I opened up my Facebook newsfeed this morning, and I came across this article that someone had posted. I started reading it, and the more and more I read, the more and more I saw a glimpse into this broken world. I can’t say I exactly understand the point the author was making, but despite that, it did what is most important in writing — it made me think.
We live in an isolated culture. This is no more apparent than to the stay at home mom who spends her days behind the four walls of her home with her only lifeline to the outside world being the windows of her home.
Our culture prides itself on self-sufficiency. We aim to do things on our own, and when we can’t, we pay someone to do them for us rather than ask for help. It’s the American way. Or at least it’s the way I see it.
We don’t have many community gatherings. We have lost that sense of rise together or fall together. And when we do finally venture out into the community, the walls we put up around our hearts are much more effective at keeping people out than the best of deadbolts or chain link fences.
We live within ourselves. If we are lucky, we find one or two people with whom we can let down our guards, but even then, it’s so difficult because we were groomed in a culture that frowned upon this. In many ways, we don’t know how to be ourselves around people.
And so it leads me to wonder if what is really missing from our happiness is actually ourselves. We deny who we are, we deny what we need, we deny our feelings and our opinions and our values, and we hide them all so far inside of us that sometimes we no longer even know who or what we are.
I was busy in my twenties. So busy in fact, that I would finally lay my head on the pillow, and I would be dizzy from fatigue. I would hold on to the sides of the bed to keep from falling off as the world seemed to spin around me. I didn’t have time to know myself, and I’m not sure I really had the desire to regardless.
But then time slowly began to open up for me. I finished grad school; I started only working one job. But then a strange thing happened. I would sit in a room by myself, and I would feel like I no longer existed. I had no idea what to do with my time, and even worse, if I did know, it would feel pointless if no one was there to experience it with me because the only way I was able to validate myself was through the eyes of another person.
I guess it’s hard to explain at this point, but basically I had started to feel like I didn’t really even exist anymore. If there was no one there to share something with, then it was as if it hadn’t happened.
Luckily I was able to slowly move through this phase and I started to learn again what I liked and what I loved and what I valued, and I was able to rebuild my sense of myself. I was able to become myself again.
And perhaps it’s through that lens that I am approaching this issue of real intimacy between human beings. Perhaps it’s because I so desperately lost myself that I feel the need for us all to desperately reclaim ourselves.
I’ve been reading Glennon Doyle Melton’s book, and she is opening my eyes to so many things. Her stories are told through the lens of radical honesty. She believes in telling who you are loudly and strongly so that others can feel more comfortable in their own skin.
Perhaps my version of that truth is that we need to tell ourselves loudly and strongly so we can continue to exist and so that we can face this world as a whole person and as a strong person. So that we can approach relationships and really come into communion with someone who knows who we truly are. So we don’t have to worry that the world will eat us up because we have already presented ourselves to the world and it hasn’t broken us. So that we can finally stop the desperate search for happiness and can come to the conclusion that it can exist within us when we are finally willing to let ourselves simply BE rather than hiding behind what it is that we think we SHOULD be and think and feel.
What if the secret to happiness isn’s something we can acquire or attain? What if it is simply to be the being that we are when all of that is taken away? What if it’s not in the acquiring but in the stripping down? What if it’s stopping trying to impress people and instead it’s trying to be as real as we possibly can? What if it’s in stripping down the facade and living with what’s left?
What if all we really need to be is ourselves? What if that’s the secret to happiness and relationships and peace and contentment?
What would you do? What would you do at this very moment if you were to become as authentically real and honest as you could be?