Defining Happiness

As part of the "Sunset Stories" monologue event held by the amazing National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) at Duke University, I had the pleasure of sharing my ideas on how changing my understanding of happiness propelled my recovery. The peaceful spring weather, the silently supportive audience members who gathered to listen to my story on the plaza, and the chance to hear others' stories of struggle as well made this event incredibly powerful and moving. The transcript of the monologue is attached below. 

*Note: Please excuse the mini technical difficulties that we experienced in the middle, hehe! 😜

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* Beginning of transcript *

The simple definition of happiness is that of white sands and blue skies. The easy life. Low stress, no responsibilities. At least, that’s how I grew up believing the definition of happiness was. 

It is true that one does not question the nature of something until it is gone. As such, it wasn’t until I experienced moments of deep unhappiness during my illness that I came to question this definition. By its very nature, the above definition suggests happiness as a form of complacence - a kind of laissez-faire attitude, a complete absence of hardship and struggle. 

As a naturally anxious and impatient person, I found it difficult to even imagine life without a sense of stress looming like a cloud above me. It seemed that I was fated to be unhappy, based on the definition I’d always believed in. 

As I climbed out of the hole of my illness, I came in contact with bits and pieces of happiness - not as it was defined to me, but the intuitive sense of happiness, the kind that filled my stomach with butterflies, the kind that caused me to smile even when no one was around to see it, the kind that made me want to sing at the top of my lungs. 

And I soon came to realize that this form of happiness never came from a sense of nothingness or complete relaxation. Instead, it mostly stemmed from having come out of a stressful situation - a period of self-driven effort, of conscious determination. My happiest moments often occurred when I was the most stressed, or right afterwards. 

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    I spoke about this issue with one of my friends one night over dinner, musing over why it was that my personal definition of happiness was so different from the one that I had grown up believing was the “standard.” 

Growing up in a Chinese family herself, my friend reflected to me that she believed this standard of happiness to have a lot to do with the gender norms in Chinese contexts. “Women are constantly told to relax and stress less, while men are told to try harder and be strong. It might just be hard for our parents to understand that in this day and age, women can’t just relax and stress less, not only because society as a whole is becoming more competitive, but because women are now empowered with more opportunities, and chasing those opportunities entails a certain amount of stress.” 

She had hit the nail right on the head. That was it.

Happiness for me, and many other women growing up in this era, didn’t exist on a sandy beach under a blue sky. It existed in struggle, in determination, in chasing opportunities that were not granted to women in the past.

Fulfilment had become the new definition of happiness. And this meant failing at times when reaching for those heights; it meant feeling overwhelmed by the amount of responsibility that our decisions held; it meant stressing out over things that we cared deeply about. 

Happiness is not passive.

Every time you reach that state of happiness, you must find it again and again through setting concrete intentions to find that state again. 

It is also useful to differentiate between happiness and contentment.

I see happiness as the peak. You climb a mountain, and you must also find your way back down. You cannot stay at the peak forever. Contentment is walking down and knowing the way back home. It is acknowledging that going home might not be as exciting as reaching the peak, and that you might even feel a little sad on this journey home. Contentment is being able to accept all those feelings, to trust your abilities enough to know that you will climb new peaks very soon. 

Whenever I would reach a “successful” moment during my eating disorder - a new pound lost, a new rib revealed - I would feel an extremely short-lived sense of happiness, then almost immediately, fear and sadness because I did not truly believe that I was capable of finding success again. I saw happiness as a destination - I thought that when I got there I would never have to make an effort to find it again.

I didn’t realize that contentment was the destination I sought - the home base, so to speak - a sense of safety and trust that would instill me with the self-efficacy I needed to find happiness again and again. 

“Sit with yourself as you would with your best friend.”

This quote epitomizes acceptance, peace and contentment to me. It is a reminder that you must establish a trusting, non-judgmental relationship with yourself before you can carry out your purpose in the world. 

* End of transcript *