The Trouble With Happiness
by CATHERINE CHEN
in Fall 2o17
Sedrick Miles, "Afro Acólito," 2017
was the supposition that in lacking it you were a moral failure.
Happiness as ideology operated insofar as you were an able participant. You were happy or you became happy. These were acceptable states. But quickly you ran into the problem of unhappiness, which was everything that was not happy. Unhappiness seemed much more dangerous and ubiquitous than happiness. When you are unhappy the last thing you want to be told is that you have failed at happiness. That your failure explains, in some way, your unhappiness. It is a deeply unhelpful logic but its deployment encapsulates so many of our so-called broken systems. We did not have an answer so we marked it immoral and promised to return to it later. We knew we would not. The unmoral seed took root, grew hysterical, and had to be institutionalized.
I felt that all of our contemporary problems could be traced to an unhappy thought and we needed only to banish it, forever. But the Right and the Left both indulged in wars of immorality and, besieged by one side or the other, you were unhappy to have been excluded. I wondered over and over when it would be permissible to govern my own unhappiness.
Catherine Chen is a poet and performer living in Atlanta. Her writing has appeared in Nat. Brut, Web Safe 2k16, Mask Magazine, among others. Find them @aluutte.