Searching for Happiness

Much of my life has been an active search for happiness – not an idle desire, but an actual concentrated effort, conducted with the scientific approach I grew up with. Happiness is one of my top goals, right next to being a generally good person and being an intelligent and rational being.

Life has a lot of factors to it. (I hereby present myself with the Understatement of the Year award.) It's hard to know what things make a difference and what things don't. For example, why was junior year so great and sophomore year so terrible? I know that I liked my classes better and my group of friends better, but which is a bigger factor in overall happiness? Being content with school or having a good group of friends? Similarly, the happiest I ever am is at summer camp. Why? It's easy enough to say “Well, it isn't specifically the canoeing, or the being in nature, or the Voyageur traditions, or even the people. It's just the ensemble of everything that makes it so great.” And while that may be somewhat true, it is not a useful statement. It means that I cannot try to apply camp to my everyday life to improve my overall happiness.

So I try to experiment with little things, refusing to give up. I speculated that waking up early to morning light might be part of the difference, so I switched rooms with my brother to catch the morning light and tried to stick with my camp sleeping habits. Did it work? Who knows. That was right around the beginning of junior year, when I did indeed get happier, but I also had better classes and better friends, as I mentioned before.

One thing that is a rare obvious difference is exercise. That is well-researched and known to be hugely effective. If you could make an anti-depression pill with the same benefits that regular exercise gives you, you'd be a millionaire. I know that I personally am extraordinarily influenced by this effect. Exercise correlates almost perfectly to my weekly ups and downs. Now that I have Ultimate, I go for runs much less often, but together they are still two of my greatest sources of happiness.

The very fact of conducting this search is also a source of happiness. I think it could go either way – there are people who try to be happy in a melancholy, “look how horrible the world is” kind of way, like they're looking for it just to prove someone wrong. A lot of moody teenagers are like this, and I sort of imagine that a lot of great poets were the same way. Can't you just imagine Edgar Allan Poe saying “Okay, I guess I'll play laser tag with you, but do you really think it will make the emptiness in my heart go away?”

On the contrary, my search for happiness is genuine, and that means that the things I notice often bring joy in themselves. Noticing that I'm happy is pleasing: when I'm laughing with friends, there's that incessant introspective part of me that's saying “hey, good job, it looks to me like you're fitting in,” and makes me smile for a different reason than the original one. When I see a dew-laden spiderweb outside my window, I stop and admire it, and it makes me smile because there's beauty in the world, and because I'm glad I can appreciate it.

One can become blind to beauty. I love the rain, but when it rains all the time, I can fall into the trap of looking outside and saying “ugh, it's still raining!” Completely forgetting the fact that I love the rain and could watch it streaming down and painting bull's-eyes on puddles for days on end. I try to avoid this line of thinking just by reminding myself that the rain is pretty. It usually works.

On an interestingly symmetrical note, one can become immune to discomfort. This is something I appreciate much more. I read in a book about the Holocaust that one can get used to anything. The German people just stopped reacting to atrocities after a while. The Jews got used to the conditions in the ghettos. And so no one really fought back, because the whole thing got started bit-by-bit, so people had time to get used to it. The same principle has been at work recently: in no way whatsoever do I want to compare my stay in France with the Holocaust, but I'm getting used to things I don't particularly like. I thought I'd never get used to being clumsy with words. I thought I would always resent that social disadvantage and be embarrassed by it. But lately I have been able to go days without remembering that my native language isn't French. I've become used to the struggle to find my words sometimes. The struggle lessens but doesn't go away, but objecting to that struggle does go away. I have become accustomed to a lot of things that aren't really my favorite: not cooking my own food, the TV and radio always being on, the immense quantities of free time at school, not being with my family, etc.

For a long time I thought happiness would be permanently out of my reach: that I, too, had fallen victim to the mental illness genes that lurk in one half of my family and would be forever adrift in depression, bipolar disorder, and whatever else lay in wait for me. Discovering that I was wrong and that I just had an unusually bad adolescent hormone experience between the ages of 11 and 15 was gratifying. Last year was a pretty darn good year. This year started off rough for a couple reasons, mostly starting with too high expectations for the “great adventure” of my year abroad (which seems to end up containing less adventure than my life at home did), the realization that I'd be happier at home, and homesickness.

But it's better now. I truly don't know if I would've been happier at home. At home I would've been bored and frustrated from my wanderlust, regretting that I hadn't taken the year to go abroad. Even if study abroad isn't everything I hoped and dreamed of, it has its fun moments, and at least I know now. It's good to know. It's good to have the experience. And now that I really am finding friends and fitting in, gaining in confidence, and learning to accept the difficulties of not being a French native, it is pretty fun. The number of good moments in my day has multiplied since a month or two ago.

The other day my frisbee coach told me that I have, without a doubt, made the best decision in my life in coming to France. Americans who speak fluent French are rare enough that I'll never have to worry about unemployment ever – the world of international business will always want me. I agreed with him, that it's a priceless experience, and that now I'm starting to really enjoy it even if a month or two ago I wasn't so sure. He looked at me for a moment and said “It was the frisbee, wasn't it?” The frisbee that gave me something to occupy myself with, a reason to stay, the confidence to speak out a little more and make friends and follow my own desires. Yup. Pretty much. And how lucky was I, to randomly end up neighbors with the frisbee coach for the ONE frisbee team in the Vendée.

Who knows what the secret to happiness is. But little by little I'm figuring out the things that help and the things that hurt. Exercise is necessary, as is having a passion. My passion used to be music, but now it can be Ultimate. Friends are necessary. I'm working on that, and I think I've found some pretty darn good ones. Confidence is necessary. I struggle with that one. But it'll be my New Year's resolution to stop being shy, because being shy is a stupid counterproductive emotion that can probably be defeated by intentional forced bravery. I think it'll also help that I'm turning 18 in February. Though it's only a number, it'll mean that I'm officially an adult, that I run my own life, have the right to make my own decisions, and can't take crap from nobody. 17 year olds have the right to their opinions and eccentricities as well, but they don't have the “I'm a responsible independent adult and I do what I want” card.

It turns out CIEE was right. My homesickness/culture shock pretty much followed their pattern exactly. Month one was scary but not too bad. I started to get settled in after that and enjoyed the beginning of month two, with a “you've got this!” kind of attitude. In the middle of month two, culture shock struck. Oh, how I was irritated at France (specifically the Vendée) and its lack of intellectualism, its parties, its judgemental females, its free time, and at the cultural and linguistic wall that kept me from feeling like I could make real friends. This lasted for about a month – it was about month 3.5 before I started forgetting how irritated I was and getting really into the activities I enjoy (aka frisbee) and hanging out with the people I like at school. December is month 4. (Holy mackerel, at the end of this month I've already been here four months. That's a third of a year! That's a pretty long time.)

It turns out time works just like it does in real life.

Wait a minute, that sentence totally didn't say what I wanted it to say. Let me try again: It turns out the way that time goes by in the space of a year mimics how time passes as we grow up. (Better.) See, when you're four, a year is a REALLY long time, because it's a fourth of your life. When you're 16, a year is not so long – only a little more than 6% of your life. Similarly, during a year abroad, the first week seems incredibly long. Every day is filled with so much new information and so much to get used to, and you evaluate all of it in the context of “this is what I'm seeing just now for the first time, and what I will have to live with for the next 10 months.” So the first week and the first month seem incredibly long and it seems unimaginable to live a whole 10 months that slowly. Fortunately, just like living, time speeds up. After you establish a weekly routine, the weeks pass quicker and quicker, each week a smaller fraction of the total time you've been abroad. And now, time just seems to be whizzing by. Each month doesn't take very much time, so in just a little bit it'll be the end of January, which is my halfway point, and then it'll be just a few months from over, and then it'll be... over. How bizarre. How incredibly weird to think about the end, when it's still just the beginning.

10 months is not a long time. Especially not in the grand scheme of things, the 100 or so years I get in total to search for happiness. And since living abroad changes everything, it gives a bucketload of new changing variables to help diversify (/confuse) the experiment. Bit by bit, life is getting better. Or I'm getting better at life. And you know what? This year is helping. I'm glad I came.