I Want You To Be Happy

[image description: a black and white tuxedo cat lounges sleepily in the sun on a plywood table inside a minivan, with bright blue sky visible out the window. The cat is viewed from below so all the viewer can see is his little face and his legs sprawled out into space, darling little toe pads at the end of his soft feet. Photograph copyright 2016 Sparrow R. Jones]

You have been weighed down for too long with care and concerns. Your body has been heavy with worries for the future and your heart races with fear. You feel like you are clinging to a cliff and your fingernails will give way any moment. You just can’t see how anything will end well. The darkness can be scary and may seem never-ending.

I’ve been there. And I’m not talking about the distant past. It’s a cold, dark pond I go wading in on a regular basis, this murky fear and muddled worry. The things that weigh my limbs down, paralyzing me with fear, might be different from the things you are being dragged under by, but we both know that pond pretty well, right?

But I want you to be happy. I want us both to be happy. I want all of us to be happy. That’s part of why I’m still here, treading water. I know I can help if I can just keep my own head above the surface long enough. I know I can help you be happy. And if I succeed, I know it will help me to be happy, too.

But what is this happiness I’m talking about? I see a lot of cynics shooting down the very idea of happiness as some kind of bliss-ninny fantasy completely divorced from reality. “I don’t go around grinning all the time. Happiness is a lie,” they say. “Being pleased with my work is the best thing I could hope for. I hate the word happy because it’s just an illusion to dangle in front of people to try to control them.” “Happy? That’s some future that will never come. Don’t talk to me about happiness.”

It took me a long time, myself, to understand what I mean when I say happy. I haven’t had a lot of happiness in my life, so even understanding what it is has been a challenge for me. I was born into a family that had already established a long history of abuse before I ever hit the scene. I was hit, insulted, set up, molested, kicked, and hit some more. I was blamed for everything that went wrong in my life, including those things other people chose to do to me. Less than a decade into life, I watched my brother lose his battle with cancer. Many more years of sexual and physical abuse followed me out of the family home and years of homelessness were capped by watching my daughter die the day she was born. By that point, life had been so hard for so long that I wondered if she weren’t the luckiest one of us all, getting to take a pass from the mire we all work so hard not to drown in.

Life is still hard for me. I am houseless — I would call it homeless, but I made a conscious decision to live in my minivan and I prefer to save the word ‘homeless’ for those who didn’t ask for the burden and are treading water harder than most of the rest of us because they ended up in such dire straits. I am poor, but I am slowly building income from my work and hope some day to be completely self-supporting. In the meantime, I am so grateful for the SSI benefits that keep me alive and above the waterline. I am lonely, but again that is by choice. I wanted to be able to travel around to try to spread a message of love and autism acceptance far and wide. Loneliness is just part of the ticket cost of this glorious ride.

But I am beginning to see happiness and just starting to understand what it’s made of — for me, anyway — and I am learning that it is not some kind of constant overwhelming joy or even a huge grin. It’s something deeper and more solid than ephemeral emotions that drift across the surface of my being like stormy waves or sunny seas. When I talk about happiness, I’m talking about something deeper than being pleased at a pretty birthday cake or excited to see a loved one again. I’ve come to a point where I no longer even think of happiness as an emotion.

When I was seventeen, I landed in a mental hospital for a time. While I was there, a family friend gave me two books to try to help me sort things out. One was a Thomas Merton book and it was interesting and soothing. But the other, an Alan Watts book, went straight to my bones. Since that time, I return to Alan Watts regularly. He barely had his own life together at all — many would say he didn’t have his life together whatsoever. He was a lifelong alcoholic, who died at the relatively young age of 58, most likely from a heart condition and the complications of alcoholic excess.

Alan Watts is what Jungian thought calls a wounded healer. The ultimate wounded healer in mythology was Chiron, the centaur who received a fatal wound from a poisoned arrow but, being immortal, could not die. Instead, he suffered tremendously and, unable to heal himself, gave up his immortality and died. Zeus could not allow such a healing teacher to pass away from the world entirely and so promised that as long as Chiron’s wisdom is needed, his teaching will live on.

Alan Watts is a Chiron for me. I was only six years old when Watts died, but he left behind words that still teach me about life. Listen to what Watts says about happiness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3srWlNHZbqU

I have found happiness in vocation. Watts talks about finding that thing that is yours to do, “because you would do that thing whether it paid you very much or whether it didn’t. Because that’s the one thing you have to do.”

For me, happiness is not about smiles or laughter or excitement. Happiness is about having finally found the place I am supposed to be and the thing I am supposed to do — the thing I could not stop doing. As Watts says, “I am a writer; I have to write, whether it makes me money or whether it doesn’t, I would still have to be a writer.” Happiness comes from doing what one is shaped to do and could not do otherwise. Happiness comes from being that which is inevitable.

I see this in some of the parents I know. They are very clearly living their dharma by growing strong children into adults who do not doubt their inalienable right to exist and thrive, to love and be loved. Although the bills weigh heavily and the future looms and they are not sure how their child will continue to live and eat when they have shuffled off this mortal coil, they are living their dharma and they are happy. They are focused and they are doing exactly what is theirs to do.

The Autistic Happiness Project [this used to be a link to my Patreon, but I have since closed down the Autistic Happiness Project] is not about birthday parties with ponies and balloons. It is about this happiness of dharma — the happiness that comes when every Autistic feels to their core that they are where they should be. That means the Autistic Happiness Project is as well-suited for fighting depression, abuse, and injustice as it is for celebrating the beauty of infinite human diversity in infinite combinations.

I want you to be happy. I want you to feel your immeasurable worth. I want your feet to be firmly rooted in the unshakeable confidence of your place in this world. I want you to find your dharma and become so immersed in it that hours pass like minutes.

Does happiness mean you will never again feel the cold water closing around you? No, because finding your place in the world does not make the world go away. But a deeply-rooted happiness will remind you why you keep treading water. A strong and solid happiness will feed your will to keep swimming, even when it seems the shore is receding. This is what my happiness gives to me: a determination to keep dog paddling through the darkness because I need to continue doing that thing I am shaped to do. My dharma awaits on the shore and that keeps my head up and my limbs moving. That is what happiness means to me.

I want you to be happy.