Your Mission: The First Happiness Challenge.

Once you’ve established what is happiness, it’s time to start collecting it. I don’t know, collecting happiness during infertility sort of sounds like scouring under the sofa cushions for spare change. Whatever you find won’t be enough to buy what you want, and sometimes there is a handful of coins and sometimes there’s nothing but dust. But maybe if you keep at it over time, gather enough coins, you’ll look down at the jar one day and realize you have enough to buy something to make the wait easier.

Maybe this analogy isn’t working.

But I think that it’s hard to be kind to yourself when you’re feeling angry with your body. I think it’s hard to remember to do something nice when you’re scrambling to balance injections, work, blood draws, cooking, semen samples, phone calls… Infertility is like having a second job and I couldn’t work things like bubble baths into my life when I had only one job.

But Tal Ben Shahar’s first exercise is about pausing. Slowing it down. Making that time for yourself. And his second exercise is about reflecting, recording, and remembering*. So this is the first 30-day challenge that I’m throwing out there. It will take place formally from September 1–30, though you can start beforehand to get into the groove. The second (which I’ll talk about later) will take place from October 1–30. Haven’t read far enough yet to know if we’ll have a challenge every month!

Challenge One: Ritual Breaks

• Think of a daily/weekly ritual that would make you happy–a place you like to visit, an activity you like to do, a person you like to see, a food you like to eat. The idea is to choose something that can be sustained over time (in other words, going to Tahiti, while nice, is not the best choice unless you have thousands to burn. And if you have thousands to burn, consider sending some to me care of my clinic). It should be something that doesn’t create more problems for the future (for instance, eating sticks of butter even if butter-eating brings you joy). It should be something that you can do frequently–if not every day then at least three times a week.
• Schedule this new ritual into your day. Literally place it in your planner or write a reminder to stick on the refrigerator. If you can’t vacuum or prepare dinner one day, that’s fine. But don’t drop your ritual.
• Write and tell me your ritual for the Challenge Post and send a link for your blog. If you don’t have a blog, send me your name and the ritual. You don’t need a blog to do this–I can post your response for you in the Annex. You can either leave a comment or email me directly. You can join now and set your ritual later. It just needs to be chosen by September 1.
• Keep a running post about your ritual that you will publish on September 30th. Keep it in your draft folder, but add to it over time to talk about your ritual–how it makes you feel, whether or not it is bringing you happiness, whether you had to change your ritual mid-challenge, whether you’ll keep at it indefinitely. If you don’t have a blog, keep your thoughts on a Word document that you can send to me right before September 30th and I’ll post it for you.

Ideas for Ritual Breaks (or snag one from someone else when they post their choice in the Challenge Post): half-hour of reading time, getting a weekly magazine subscription (and scheduling time to read People…I mean…your magazine of choice), eating at a favourite restaurant once a week on the same day, scheduling in a date night once a week (or a date night-in where you cook dinner together and then he/she gives you a massage), getting out a bunch of cookbooks from the library and teaching yourself how to make dimsum, eating one piece of chocolate right before bed, running for an hour, driving on a favourite road, meditation.

The point is to choose something that will make you happy regardless of how it sounds when you put it into words. It’s not about choosing the most challenging ritual or interesting ritual. Just a little moment that will make you happy. And again, if you can do it daily, all the better. If you can only do it once a week, there is more of a chance that it will slip through the cracks.

Once you’ve decided to participate, let me know so I can link to you. And tell me your ritual so I can add it to the list. Keep tabs on how your ritual is changing your day or level of happiness (damn, and drop your ritual if at any point it is making you unhappy). Feel free to blog about it over the course of the month, but also post a summary of the exercise on September 30th (and you know I’ll be sending out reminders for that post).

* A lot of this is my interpretation of the text and my response to his words. I’m also skipping over anything that hasn’t been directly helpful for me (isn’t it always about me? Selfish bitch). Which is not to say that it wouldn’t be helpful for you or for me at a later date. So if this stuff is resonating with you in any way, shape, or form, you should read the book from cover to cover because there is a lot more there.

Okay, first things first (according to the author of Happier). What is happiness? As in, what is your definition of happiness?

Tal Ben Shahar defines it as the ultimate currency–the thing we should be working towards amassing over tangible items such as money or iPods. But how will you know if you have it–either a small pocketful or enough to choke a horse–if you don’t know what it is?

Ben Shahar writes, “Is it an emotion? Is it the same as pleasure? Is it the absence of pain? The experience of bliss? Words like pleasure, bliss, ecstasy, and contentment are often used interchangeably with the word happiness, but none of them describes precisely what I mean when I think about happiness. These emotions are fleeting, and while they are enjoyable and significant, they are not the measure–or the pillars–of happiness. We can experience sadness at times and still enjoy overall happiness” (p. 6).

So, first things first–ask yourself that question and answer it before you read my definition below. I do think there is room for all of us to have our own personal definition of happiness and have all of those definitions come together to form a larger, collective definition. Perhaps happiness is something too large to be contained to a neat series of words like a dictionary entry. Instead it needs to be painted, like a picture, with anecdotes and listings.

Okay, you have your own definition in place? Don’t read on until you do…

I define happiness as the peace that comes from a lack of anxiety. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t stressors that occupy my worrying hours, but the major tiles that need to be in place are set firmly in their foundation. My needs–what I need those tiles to be–change from time to time. Some tiles remain a constant. When I have those tiles in place, I have a place to stand and I feel secure. I’m aware that bad things may happen and I certainly worry that I’ll have happiness taken away from me.

Which, I’m beginning to think, is part of this book. Helping you maintain that foundation even though the storms. At the beginning of the book, he admits that happiness may not be attainable for everyone. Either a person has internal (depression, anxiety disorders, illness) or external (poverty, divorce, abuse) obstacles standing in the way of setting that foundation. But right now, even though I have infertility knocking me around, I think I am in a space to set that foundation. At least I need to believe that I can set that happiness foundation or this whole project is a moot point. And I’m wasting my time reading these books.

Thinking of happiness in terms of tiles is a scary thing because it means that (1) those tiles can be taken away or (2) they may never be achieved. If one of my needs is completing my family, how will I ever build that foundation if I’m basing my happiness in that? People can leave me and jobs can be lost. It feels very vulnerable to have my heart placed in other people’s hands. But how can great happiness be achieved otherwise?

So what is your definition of happiness? If you answer this one on your blog, please leave a link to the url below in the comments section so other people can read along too.

I had a terrible time in grad school. I wanted the degree, but I wished I could take the classes while sitting under Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. I came into the program sad and a series of situations kept me in that emotional space for over three years. Which is not to say that I was never happy, but I think we can all look at our life much like the picture on the left: there is an underlying colour that serves as the background and there are fleeting colours serving as momentary markers. My background was sad and it was broken up by moments of happiness that came and left without leaving an impression. If you asked me how I felt during that time period, I would sum it up as being sad–that was the constant–though I know there was happiness in there too.

Infertility and loss have a way of feeling like torture. While it’s happening, it’s so painful and all you can think about is that future moment when you won’t be feeling this intense amount of pain. And I think we all believe that the key to happiness, the key to ending the torture, is to parent. I think the torture begins lessening when you get that positive test or you receive your match/referral. But I think we’re all focused on that day when the child is in our arms or in our house and we are parents. And part of that is true.

But then how do we explain the fact that infertile women are four times as likely to suffer from postpartum depression?

I think a lot of it is a lack of release valves–we seal them off ourselves because we’re too worried what turning them on means. Complaining and venting is a resource that non-infertile women use to get through the stress of pregnancy or the stress that comes with new parenthood. But we think we can’t complain because that means that we’re not grateful. We’re scared to complain to our support system–usually other infertile women–because we know they would trade anything to be in a between-ultrasounds panic rather than a two-week-wait. We’re scared to complain to our friends or parents for fear that they won’t understand and say, “but you wanted this.”

I think the other reality is that we make parenting the goal that will lead to happiness rather than making happiness the direct goal. Does that make any sense? I think we equate parenthood with happiness therefore, we drop happiness from the equation and aim for parenthood. When we get there and we see that parenthood isn’t necessary the same as happiness, we’re confused. And that’s not to say that parenthood isn’t a happy space. But I think that regardless of situation, you have a background colour–a colour to your walls, let’s say–that doesn’t necessarily change regardless of what you bring into the room. If my walls are red, they are going to remain red whether I bring in a brown sofa, blue sofa, or white sofa. If I don’t have happiness, I don’t think bringing a baby or child into the house changes that.

Children are sort of like money in that regard. Not having them brings a lot of stress. But having them brings stress too. And when you don’t have children, you think that the stress that comes from having children is more manageable. Just as you can’t really imagine the problems of the rich are that bad. But parenthood is stressful. While I wouldn’t trade it for anything and I’m obviously willing to do anything/everything to parent another child, I am also appreciative when someone is complaining to me about the sleeplessness or the lack of privacy or the infinite changes that take place with parenthood.

So what is a person to do? Aim for happiness itself rather than goals that we think will bring us happiness?

There has been a glut of positive psychology books on the market. And I’m lumping Daniel Gilbert in there even though he doesn’t call himself a positive psychologist (he calls his study prospection–the ability to predict what will make us happy). They seem to keep swirling into the Colbert Report studio. It feels like they were all waiting until I started to come to my tipping point, where sadness was repainting my walls a dim grey–becoming my background colour–to release their books. Because I have been sad lately. I’ve been angry lately and jealous lately.

Once I started hearing about this glut of positive psychology books from my two sources for news: the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, I was interested in seeing how they differ from the self-help books that flood the market. I picked up two of these books: Happier by Tal Ben Shahar and Stumbling to Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. The first is a “workbook”-like text that brings the information provided in Ben Shahar’s popular Harvard course to your living room (I keep calling out to Josh, “I need to go do my homework since I’m now a Harvard-of-the-Living-Room student.” Not that I have Ivy League envy). The purpose of the book is to make you happier by shifting how you view happiness or how you structure your life. The other book is another psychology text that looks at why we’re so terrible at predicting what will make us happy. Both of them are my project for the fall. And I’d love it if you followed along and became happier with me.

I started with the Tal Ben Shahar book first and I’m only a few pages into it. While it would rock if you picked it up and read it too and everyone got into a huge love fest over the blogosphere*, you don’t need to read along in order to participate. I’m going to throw my thoughts out there as I read and you can respond too with your own thoughts to his “workbook” questions. Regardless of post titles, this is not about the Partidgeification of Happiness where we all talk ourselves into being happy and run through imaginary fields of flowers and dance under rainbows. This is about taking an extremely stressful situation and trying to paint the walls a brighter colour in our lives so that happiness becomes the backdrop we walk into once the external stressor is lifted. That external stressor doesn’t have to be parenthood. Leaving that external stressor could be taking control and walking away and living child-free. But regardless, the “end” of the torture even if the memory of the torture remains.

This is getting a bit long, so I’ll start the first exercise in a separate post. Each time I’m writing about happiness this summer/fall, I’ll put the icon at the top of the post. And I’ll bold the exercise so you can do it too. And feel free to take the questions and run with them yourself in your own blog post. I would like to keep an ongoing list with my posts and your posts in one space so anyone walking into the discussion at some middle point can go backwards and see everything. So it’s a good idea, if you end up writing your own post that day, to leave a comment on my post too with a link to your post so I can add it to the list and other people can jump there as well.

Back to the picture at the top: during graduate school, I had two offices. I had one in the English building. I had another that was actually a reading room with a locked door afforded to graduate students in the school library. I spent most of my time in the second office and even met with students in the tiny space. No one could understand why I wanted to be in this tiny locked room rather than the more prestigious space inside the English build
ing. But my library room had a blueish-purple carpet the same colour as the picture above. It made me happier to look at it. It was such a small thing, but being in that space brought more peace than my grey-tiled office. So I went with the ultramarine.

Back then it was ultramarine–now orange and yellow are my favourite colours. And again, it is such a small thing, but wearing the colours or being in a room painted those colours makes me happier. And knowing that, it seems silly not to take advantage of it. So I’m going to try to repaint things a bit this fall. Not literally–we already have pumpkin-coloured walls in our house–but figuratively. Regardless of the outcome of this journey, I need to be in a space where I’m happy. So I’m going to try to take myself there.

* Tal Ben Shahar begins his book calling for a happiness revolution. He writes in the preface: “I believe that if enough people recognize the true nature of happiness as the ultimate currency, we will witness society-wide abundance not only of happiness but also of goodness” (xiv).

Seriously, as the chickie who keeps nudging you with the Lost and Found and Connections Abound, do you honestly think I could walk by that sentence without thinking, “yes, he’s right. Get everyone on board and the happiness will create a sea of goodness as well. There will be people helping others achieve happiness and those people will receive support as well.” And community continues.

So I hope you’ll read along and play along from home and get this discussion started. And have real happiness grow from the discussion and its subsequent action. Plus, I’ve designated it my fall project so… I don’t want to do my homework alone. Join me?

The saying goes, the longer the relationship, the more locations that are ruined for future pleasure when the relationship ends (okay, so I just made up that saying, but doesn’t it sound more important if I declare that it’s a “saying” rather than something made up?). There is a direct correlation between the level of bitterness in the parting and the desire to avoid these aforementioned places. Which is why I do all of my break-ups and unpleasant conversations at a single restaurant: Cactus Cantina on Wisconsin Avenue.

Washingtonians are probably gasping at this moment–why would anyone ruin Cactus Cantina for themselves? To be honest, I’ve never loved the restaurant and I’m more of a Guapo’s girl at heart. But beyond that, the restaurant was previously ruined for me by a boyfriend and I decided to keep using it as a dumping ground as to not contaminate any other establishments with bad memories.

Which means that when I ask a person to meet me at Cactus Cantina, it invariably means that I have terrible news to impart. And when I sense that someone has something to tell me that I don’t want to hear, I suggest Cactus Cantina for a meal or drink.

But infertility and loss are so huge, so long-lasting and bitter-inducing that so many locations are ruined along the way. They become Location Casualties, those places that you never want to go back to because all they do is remind you of what you don’t have or (if you currently are parenting) what you went through to get to your current place. For instance, the first place you started trying when your heart felt so hopeful. This, of course, assumes that your first time wasn’t at home. For us it was a little bed and breakfast at Deep Creek Lake. We were absolutely giddy while we were there and two weeks later, we were absolutely disappointed.

Deep Creek Lake was ruined a second time when it was the site (actually, a gas station bathroom was the site) of a chemical pregnancy. While I would love to see Kentuck Knob or Fallingwater again, I really can’t bring myself to jump on I-70 and drive up there. Perhaps if I had visited Deep Creek Lake any other time in life, I would have other memories to fall back on when I considered the place. But since my only experiences were naive giddiness and blood…well, it seems to be scratched as a future vacation destination.

The Doylestown area is a place I’d like to avoid forever. My memories of that vacation were summed up in this little nugget from my journal: “I want to throw things. I want to hit someone. I want to be by myself. I don’t even want to be me.” Which does not really sum up the natural beauty of the bed and breakfast we visited on a small working farm with hens scurrying around the front yard. But infertility has a way of blotting out the landscape. We were there during a canceled cycle and that area is always a place I associate with unhappiness, self-hatred, and no decent coffeehouses.

Most places that had previous associations managed to skate through the emotional hailstorm. We went to Disney twice during infertility and it has only remained a viable vacation option due to happy memories from a childhood visit. I was melancholy at the beach, but it’s also the place we went before the wedding so it came out unscathed. But poor Georgetown? A whole section of the city? It doesn’t matter if it was my hang-out space through college. Who cares if I even worked down there for years. I always associate that section of town with a retail therapy trip after a negative that yielded three hats as well as the NICU. Sorry, Georgetown. You’re dead to me.

What places are your location casualties? The places that feel forever ruined–either due to infertility or loss or another reason.

Update at bottom (and yet again on Saturday afternoon):

Inspired by our trip through eighties clothing earlier in the week, my top middle school outfit of all time: black Limited skirt with small white dots. Black sweater. Bright purple stockings. My hot Mia flats. No…wait, wait…purple, red, and green oversized sweater from Esprit that went down to my knees, green stirrup pants, socks over the stirrups, high tops. Actually, my mesh top or my double t-shirt (remember those Forenza t-shirts at the Limited where you layered them?). And leggings. Leggings, leggings, leggings. These were the good parts of middle school–not the hiding-in-the-bathroom parts of middle school, but the clothing and movies and toys that I still like to think about even though I cringe when I have to confront visual evidence of my fashion sense.

And so, the question of the week: list the components of your favourite middle school outfit. Extra points for describing hair style as well. Or remembering a special time when you wore aforementioned outfit. Story, story, story!

Um…I really need more reporters. Don’t be scared off by the word “reporter”–you don’t need to write articles or crouch along the alleyways, snapping pictures of infertile celebrities as they go into their frou frou clinics. All you need is to click through a section of my blogroll once or twice a week and collect any news–announcements of any variety or support needed–and report it for Lost and Found. See, report. Reporter. That’s what I mean by the world. And if it’s the word that’s tripping you up, I can easily call everyone Clickers. Does clicker sound like a dirty word? Regardless, you get not only my unending devotion, but yourself rendered in Microsoft Paint and added to the reporters page with a link to your blog and a small blurb about you. Doesn’t everyone want their likeness in Microsoft Paint?

Here are the categories. It would be best for you to “sign up” via the comments section so people can see which sections already have coverage. More than one person can have a section–hell, 20 people can share a single section–but I’d like to spread out the coverage so all sections have people watching out for them.