Screw Your Happy Ending
On Clearing a Path For The Imperfect Messiness of Right Now
Who doesn’t love a good success story? The internet is full of them.
There’s the restless, depressed lady with the skin condition. She left her dissatisfying day job to start an organic mustard business after realizing that happiness is a state of mind. Or, how about anxious desk-job guy? He wanted so much to find love, but instead kept attracting one commitment-phobe after another. You know what happened to him? He changed his whole life by doing that thing you keep reading about and now he’s married with two kids and never gets constipated.
These people are happy now and they want to tell us about it. They’ve found The Golden Ticket and they’ve taken to waving it from the rooftops, screaming “The Ticket, The Ticket! I found the ticket over here!
But I can’t see your glimmering solution from all the way over here. Not really. And that doesn’t negate your ticket or my empty hand. But it does mean there are other stories — stories still in progress — out there to tell. Like Mustard Lady’s cousin who just found out she has HPV, the genital warts edition. Or Desk-Job Guy’s friend who had to put his dog down last week.
To tell these stories, however, would be to break the unspoken story-telling code. You know the one: “Don’t tell us about your shit while you’re knee-deep in it — misfortune is only palatable once it’s been reconstituted as a tidy, uplifting anecdote.”
And this bothers me. It reminds me of the time when I was three years old and my aunt stuck me in my cousins bedroom after a meltdown. She made it clear I was welcome to come out once I could compose myself, but until then, I needed to be alone. I remember being so mad, and also for the first time, getting the distinct feeling that public messiness was not allowed.
Our culture seems to extol the happy ending and fear uncertainty. We live in a place where the inability to cull a shiny tale of redemption from a pile of turds, is seen not only as a failure of imagination, but also a lack of will. A place in which we’ve become conditioned by the false belief that self-sufficiency and composure are more important than community and vulnerability.
Mustard Lady, not unlike tantrum-throwing, three year-old me, knew that to be heard, you’re not supposed to come out of your cousin’s bedroom until you can behave like a person who is not sad or dimpled or conflicted or anxious, anymore.
But what if in offering one another the opportunity to learn about our personal adversities — before they’re re-packaged as commodified, happy endings — we’re actually offering one another something just as important as the hope found in a sunny conclusion?
What if connection in the messy now is the secret anecdote to the disconnection so many of us feel?
I think we need to consider the idea that in sharing these success stories, maybe we aren’t simply sending tidings of hope to the weary. Maybe we’re also perpetuating a belief that people can’t handle hearing about our problems while we’re knee-deep in them.
And yes, maybe these tales of woe turned to wow can provide us with needed glimmers of hope in an sometimes bleak landscape. Because I believe they can do that too. But I think for a lot of us, comparing our own current circumstances to other people’s completed puzzles, creates an inequity that often leaves one feeling more alienated than inspired.
But we can do better. And not by being better, but simply by being where we are. Together. We can send our flares up into the dark night, even when we think no-one is there to see them, or would even want to. When we think everyone else is busy watching the orchestrated magic of all the firework displays, with their perfectly timed beginnings and grand finales.
Because you know what? I will see your flare, and I know you’ll see mine. And it’ll light our part of the sky so bright, it won’t matter that dawn is still a ways off.
I think it’s time we created a new story-telling code. One that says it’s OK if you don’t have the answers, come out of the shadows anyway. We can say, “This is my story…so far. This is hard and I’m not sure what it all adds up to. But I know it will mean something to someone.”
We can begin to train one another to share in the uncomfortable situations and the messy, not yet fleshed-out feelings, without placing undue importance on some sunny conclusion many of us have not yet reached. And yes, let us share in each other’s triumphs, too! But let it not be at the expense of connecting with one another right where we are.
Let’s start showing up for each other without feeling the need to solve or be solved. Let’s start taking our internet parables and our podcast exemplum with a side of reality, knowing that what we have in this moment — the messy, vexing feelings we all share — are what truly connect us. Let’s come clean with each other before we are.
Because I can’t think of anything more comforting when I do find myself knee-deep in some shit, than knowing that I’m knee-deep in some shit with, messy, wonderful you.
