Should I try to be happier?

Generally anything that starts with “should” sends up a red flag to me now. Shoulds are usually about what other people expect of me, or worse, what I think other people expect of me.

But the reason I ask this is because the world seems to think the pursuit of happiness is a worthwhile goal. It’s enshrined in the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence or one of those founding documents. That seems like it must be pretty major, to put it in there as a principle for a whole country.

No wonder so many Americans blog about happiness and how to find it. First among millions has got to be Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. There are about a gazillion blogs that exhort daily gratitude affirmations. There are social sites like 43 Things where people list their New Year’s resolutions and any-time-of-the-year resolutions. There are millions of blogs devoted to being more productive, more energetic, more healthy, more financially savvy, more… everything.

That’s where I have to stop and ask, are we really that useless the way we are? Why can’t I just be as I am? Why do I have to go out and improve every aspect of my life?

I don’t of course. But I feel like I should, because everyone else is doing it. What’s wrong with me, that I don’t want to? Why am I happy being grumpy? [Yeah I know, if I really were happy about it I wouldn't bother writing this.]

I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I am thinking this: that the pursuit of happiness is a false goal. I read Do you overemphasize happiness? on Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist [if I could only take one blog to a desert island I would take hers] and it got me thinking: is the pursuit of happiness for its own sake just another way to be completely self-absorbed but make yourself think that it’s for the good of the world (because a world full of happy people would presumably be better than the one we have now)?

The times I’ve been truly happy (in that deep contentment way) have been times when I’ve been far too busy to notice or care whether I was happy or not.  I was busy. I was doing stuff, and I was so engrossed in it that I wasn’t thinking about anything else.

So perhaps instead of sitting round thinking of ten things I could be grateful for, or breathing consciously to release negative energy, I could just do some stuff to do that I really like doing. And maybe stop doing the stuff I don’t like doing.

I survived the holiday season

This year I got through the Christmas-New Year week in good form.

I decided about a month ago not to spend Christmas in town, so changed my travel plans and headed to the beach house on Christmas Eve. I also invited a colleague and her partner to come and join me there. They are Dutch, so had no family here to spend it with.

This turned out to be a very good plan for me. I really enjoyed having them there, and the weather was glorious (27C, sunny, blue skies, no wind) so we had a very relaxed time outside in the garden, grazing on a selection of foods as the day wore on. Very nice. No presents, no great performances of food, just eating when we were hungry and that was that.

They departed the next day for other destinations leaving me to my own devices on my birthday a few days later. Now, not infrequently, I have been unable to get out of bed on my birthday, and have spent most of the day barely moving, with a pillow over my head blocking out the world. Either that or forcing myself to do something with whoever realises it’s my birthday and thinks I Ought To Celebrate it.

But this year was different. I got out of bed in the morning, made coffee and sat on the beach to drink it. Then I heated up some croissants as a treat. Later in the morning, I decided to go into the village for lunch and some window shopping which turned into actual shopping, some treats for me. I had a lovely lunch by myself reading the newspaper and watching the seabirds do whatever it is they do in the tidal flats. I bought some magazines, came home and spent the afternoon under the sun umbrella reading them. Perfect.

I had a really good day and felt absolutely fine – ordinary in fact. And that is a big, big step forward for me. No crying, no grey clouds hanging over me, no black dog… So I am really proud of me. Yay, me.

I need friends

I need some friends.

I realised the other day that I needed to update my emergency contact details at work, but I couldn’t think of anyone to put down as my emergency contact person.

My parents are too elderly to be dealing with this, and couldn’t deal with it anyway. At the last emergency I had fifteen years ago, my brother told the person who called him to tell him I was in hospital,

So why are you calling me? If she isn’t dead it can’t be that serious, and if she is dead, there’s nothing I can do about it.

My sister, well, she’d just manufacture a bigger crisis of her own to show me that mine really wasn’t that important.

At which point, I realised I needed some friends. I do have friends, just not here. My oldest friend lives about 7h north of me. Another close friend is in Australia, and two others in the US. None of these people can do what an emergency contact needs to do.

In town I have a cousin and I have an old school friend I see maybe twice a year. The only friend I talk to and see more regularly than this is my brother’s ex. But oddly, I’m not sure I can ask her. It feels … presumptuous? inappropriate? to ask her to contact all my family members in the event something catastrophic happens to me. She might not want to speak to them. She might find it awkward. Still, I think I’ll ask her.

Regardless of the outcome, I’m still left with the bald fact that I am lacking friends. I don’t want quantity, I want quality. And quality takes time to find and develop. And I don’t really know where, or how, to start.

Giftless by choice

Well now, you wouldn’t expect me to give Christmas presents, would you? And you’d be right.

I hemmed and hawed about this for several years, alternating between buying presents for everyone to buying for just as few, then feeling guilty that I had nothing to exchange when someone gave me something. Eventually I realised that I never felt offended if I gave someone a gift and they didn’t give anything in return, so quite probably they didn’t either. And if they did, well, I probably wouldn’t get one next year, so problem solved.

I was going to say that I no longer buy gifts at all, but that is a lie. I no longer buy gifts for family or friends. Of course, I don’t actually like my family and I don’t see them and don’t spend Christmas with them so that all makes it quite straightforward. Most of my friends live far away and we long ago quietly agreed not to ship things across the world to one another.

This year, the only gift I bought was a box of chocolates for my massage therapist. Why her? Because she is lovely and I don’t really have another way to thank her for being so good at undoing all the knots in my shoulders. I pay her, naturally, but that is an entirely different thing. Paying her is a commercial agreement; a gift is a freely-given token of gratitude.

I don’t think the gift issue is anything to do with Christmas. I find gift shopping incredibly difficult. For a start, I have no idea what to get anyone. I loathe giving cheap rubbish I wouldn’t want myself, and I often realise I don’t know the person well enough to know what they would like, which makes the act of gift-giving seem somewhat fraudulent. I struggle with birthdays, with hostess gifts, with any kind of celebration that requires a gift. I find it so impossibly impossible that I frequently end up not doing it at all.

I don’t receive gifts either, unsurprisingly. I prefer this. Gifts often serve to point out merely that people don’t ‘get’ me at all, so it’s probably better all round that we both maintain the illusion. Mr Ex was particularly bad at getting this wrong: he tried so hard, but he just didn’t get it at all and it showed, badly.

The best present I ever got was from a man who had never had a girlfriend and lived a celibate life born of religious conviction. He gave me bunch of tulips and Oscar Wilde’s Collected Short Stories as a thank you for providing hospitality (a meal and a ride to the airport). I love tulips and Oscar Wilde. How he knew that I’ll never know.

Overstepping my boundaries

About a year ago now, Ex and I moved into the house I am still living in (he moved out). When we moved in we needed to fix an underfloor ventilation problem we knew about so we had a company install an air exchanger. The trouble was that the company didn’t bill us for it until now.

Back then, Ex decided he would pay for this. I didn’t want that, as the house was mine and I believed all infrastructural expenses were my responsibility but he was insistent so I let it go. Now, however, he is not here so naturally enough I expected to pay the bill if and when it arrived.

Except he contacted the company and had them send him the bill. He then emailed me to say he had received it and wanted to check to make sure we didn’t both pay it. I responded saying I did not want him to pay it, that I would, but  he went ahead and paid it, maintaining that he had made this promise and he would keep his word. Even though I explicitly asked him not to.

I was incensed by this. It has nothing to do with money (it’s kind of absurd really – most separated couples would have this  fight the other way around, trying to extract the money from one another).  This fight is to do with boundaries.

Ex knows that because of my mother and sister I grew up with almost no boundaries and as a consequence spent a large part of my life feeling completely violated.  So when I tell him what I want, when it involves something as intimate to me as home, and he completely ignores it and says “what I want in this situation is more important than what you want”, well, that feels like a very familiar sense of complete violation.

It seems to me that he is very like my mother in this: his image of himself, his need to see himself as ’someone who keeps his word no matter what’, overrides all common sense or respect for another.  He takes this to ridiculous extremes: he married someone just because he had asked her in a fit of passion, even though he knew he didn’t want to and it was a huge mistake, but it was more important to him to keep his word than be honest with her or himself. That’s just stupid.

In this particular situation, given that the house is mine, I get to decide what goes in it and who pays for it. He doesn’t. Not any more.

I have fixed the money side of this: I simply contacted the company, explained the situation, drove out there with a cheque, and asked them to return his when it arrived.

What I cannot fix is the damage he has done to whatever might have been left of our relationship. As far as I am concerned, that is the end of the road. I don’t believe there is any respect there, and without that, there’s no point.

I’ve gone wireless and I’m happy

I love technology when it works.

I switched off my landline the other day and replaced it and my fixed line broadband with a wireless USB stick and a wireless phone.

The phone set up involved removing it from the packaging, inserting the SIM card, and plugging it in. It flashed as it was supposed to then settled down to a steady green light to say “I’m ready” and that was it. Done. That is technology as it should be. And reception is excellent.

The wireless USB was almost as simple: plug it in, say yes to install the software, wait for it to install, then hello world! I’m on the interwebs. Compared with the endless toing and froing involved in setting up my wireless router, this was a dream. And it’s about twice as fast as the old fixed line. I can actually watch videos now without spending more time watching the little circles chasing each other than the video itself.

I thought I might be buying myself a whole lot of grief committing myself so irrevocably to wireless, but so far, I have no regrets.

Why the silly season makes me miserable

Where to begin?

I’m worn out. Here in the southern hemisphere Christmas coincides with summer holidays. What this means is that we go 12 months between breaks instead of the 6 months in the northern hemisphere. We don’t have a nice wind-down period in the middle of June; we go straight through for one very long year. Come December, the stress is showing and everyone is not only tired, but racing to finish everything as though come 1 Jan coaches will turn back into pumpkins.  So there’s work pressure, Christmas shopping pressure, and getting-ready-for-summer-holiday pressure.

Christmas work parties are of course beyond awful, and more so for introverts. I went to ours, feeling that I couldn’t reasonably excuse myself. It is a requirement of sorts. Large groups of people I have little in common with, drinking copiously, making coarse and lewd jokes, playing silly games, and the men draping themselves around me to tell me to “have another drink and loosen up”, drove me to the brink. I was wound as tight as a watch spring, and utterly exhausted from the sheer hideousness of it. By the time I got home I was in tears and I spent Saturday in bed  recovering.

I  dislike Christmas. I find it an ordeal, and do my utmost to avoid it. I have decided this year to go away on Christmas Eve. Making a decision not to participate doesn’t make it any less stressful, I might add: it brings out the best manipulation techniques my narcissist mother can drum up. I am reassuring myself that it gives her an opportunity to feel like a martyr and she likes that, so in a perverse way I’m doing her a favour.

Christmas shopping is odious of course, but I no longer do it so it’s not really a contributor to my misery any more. However, the fact that it’s the season for it means that all forms of shopping are made twice as unbearable as usual.

Going on holiday with 1.5m of your closest friends is hell for an introvert. Everyone is on the move, on the road, often driving badly, drifting along taking their time and not paying a blind bit of attention to anything around them. They’re on holiday so everyone should just slow down etc. Well, I hate being around large crowds and just want to get out of them as soon as I can. I want to drive and get as much distance between me and the rest of the holiday crowds as quickly as I can. No, I don’t drive like an idiot, but I do just want to keep moving and not spend time rubber-necking. I’m on a mission to get to my beach house, my refuge, I need to get their while it’s still daylight, and I have to do my shopping before I leave the last supermarket behind. So, I have things to get done, and I’m on a timetable. So get out of my way. Please.

Jet skis are the watersport equivalent of a dentist drill. They ruin a perfectly quiet summer evening, and they are ridden by posers who fancy themselves as being in an episode of Baywatch. I loathe and detest these things and fail to understand why their right to enjoy the beautiful bay on their noisy machines should override my right to enjoy the beautiful bay in peace and quiet.

The final insult is that I have a birthday between Christmas and New Year. In general I think this is probably a poor time of year to have a birthday, but now that you know my mother is a narcissist you can perhaps understand why it was doubly bad. I rarely got a birthday present, as it was always “combined” with my Christmas present, which didn’t fool me then or now – they simply couldn’t be bothered. The day was largely ignored, a couple of times forgotten altogether, I was routinely told I was selfish for being upset that no-one took any notice. I was told it was just a “hassle” (which by extension I took to mean that I was a hassle). Interestingly, my parents’ wedding anniversary occurs the day after my birthday but apparently that wasn’t a hassle, and never were anniversary and Christmas presents combined. Nor was it ever forgotten. I struggle every year with what to do on my birthday: my tendency is to stay in bed all day and wait until it’s over. I recognise that this isn’t healthy. I’m a grown-up and probably need to act a bit more like it. I do feel a profound sense of paralysis though. It’s the nadir of my year, every year, a day that reminds me that I don’t matter.

So it’s a couple of weeks till Christmas. I feel miserable already. It’s a familiar kind of misery though. On some level I know that “this too shall pass”. Waiting for it to pass is the hard bit. All the Advent talk at mass only highlights that this should be a time of anticipation of joy, but instead for me it’s a time of dread.

Predictable responses

I shared the good news of those letters from the bosses with my parents the other night. I could have, or perhaps should have, anticipated the responses.

When I said I had received a handwritten letter from the CEO, my mother interrupted immediately saying,

Oh that’s just like my father receiving a letter from Professor Famous-Person

Then, when I ignored that and carried on, my mother’s next question was,

Can we tell our friends about this?

You’ll notice the complete absence of “Congratulations, that is wonderful, you must be so proud, we’re so proud” kinds of response.  This was apparently all about her, not me.

Was I surprised? No. Was I hurt?  A little, but less than I would have been before I realised she is a narcissist and unlikely to change.

Getting praise for work well done

In a complete turnaround from last week, I received the most extraordinary feedback from the Big Bosses on the work I presented to the exec. Okay, so it was 5 days after the fact, and in truth I suspect there was some tugging on sleeves that generated this but still: I got two personal messages from the Top Dogs thanking me for my work and extolling its virtues.

One of the messages was emailed, and was quite long. It’s the kind of thing I’ll quote in future job applications until I die probably. Well, seriously, how often do you get to say ‘The Second Most Important Person in the Organisation said my work is fantastic”?’

The other message was handwritten and was delivered to my desk. I was COMPLETELY blown away by this. That the CEO would take time to write a message like that was just incomprehensible to me. I was really stunned. I emailed him to say thank you and got a reply to my email. This just left my head spinning. We were rapidly approaching the “thank you for your thank you to my thank you” but it just boggled my mind really.

Which just goes to show.

Saying thank you is huge, and the higher up the hierarchy you are, the more that thank you means to the underlings. I was absolutely demoralised after that presentation, and yes, it would have been really great to hear those things said at the time, but hey, they got said, and in writing.

I’m going to frame that letter from the CEO

A kick in the teeth

This week was a huge week at work. For the last 18 months I’ve been working on a development programme, and on Wednesday we took it to the Executive committee to get approval to proceed. We’d done loads of groundwork and we were pretty confident that it would be okay, but still… no chicken counting was going on.

So we presented (I did half, my boss did half) and it all went fine, and we got to question time. Nothing untoward there, most of the members had fairly predictable questions, which we answered easily enough. I hadn’t been to the Exec Committee before so wasn’t 100% sure of the proceedings but figured at this point the CEO would wrap up, they’d vote and we’d be formally given a green light or not.

But no. There was some throat clearing, then finally the CEO said “ah, thank you, ah… yes, right… so we’ll take a 5 minute break now” and everyone got up and started heading for the toilets or their mobile phones. My boss and I packed up, a couple of people came up and said “good job”, and we walked out.

I went downstairs and ran into the other managers who excitedly asked “So did it pass?” and I replied, “I think so…”.

And then I returned to my desk and started working on the next project.

I was gutted. I wanted to cry. I suddenly understood why the employee engagement survey results are so appalling. I realised that no-one in that room cared about being good, they were all happy with mediocrity. I could have gone to them with a proposal half as well thought out, with a presentation covered in tedious bullet points (instead of the dynamic and visual explanation I had created to make sure they understood the proposal and its benefits) and the result would have been no different.

I felt like the stuffing had been kicked out of me. I really wondered why I bothered. And I realised how easy this would be to fix: say something nice. Recognise that I had put in months of work and it was a good job. Have a vote, get a definite result, say congratulations to us. In other words, take some notice, recognise good work when you see it, be professional and courteous, and treat the outcome of the massive amounts of work that appear in front of you with some dignity and formality. Acknowledge that this project has cost you several million already and it has been worth it.

I came home and considered quitting my job that night, because I truly didn’t see the point any longer. If they didn’t care, why should I?