Fight Back With Joy by Margaret Feinberg (2015)
Happier Now by Natalya Kogan (2018)
This Close to Happy by Daphne Merkin (2017)
IN JUNE 2018, TWO CELEBRITY SUICIDES shocked fans of fashion and tv food shows and reignited the discourse on why people commit suicide. As usual, the reports claimed that the deceased gave no signs of their struggles as though they were reprehensible for not having visible symptoms and signs of distress. It should be pointed out that modern technology has also given us the power to curate the impressions we want to project, as well as how much and where we are seen by others. As a result, vulnerability that creates a true connection between people has become a quality that is avoided in everyday face-to-face connections.
Despair demands answers. Hope waits for it. Despair drives people to suicide. Despair is being isolated in pain. Hope is someone stepping in uninvited with the authority of love.
Living is also not the same as having something to live for. Even the most unimaginative of us get up each morning with a vague sense of mission in life and importance to people around us. But I imagine that for certain people, the only thing that keeps them going each day are new and exciting projects they keep taking on for a sense of purpose to justify staying on for another day. These become crutches that though necessary are still crutches. Over time, these high-functioning individuals become even better at driving multiple high-profile projects that become associated with their names but soon weaken as the compelling reason to live another day for. Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade took their own lives in the midst of impressive ongoing projects.
Reactions to suicides invariably leads to people talking about the victim’s mental and emotional state. I’m certain that suicides are not a result of character failure but are psychosocial manifestations and social tragedies. Depression is term that is over-used as a simple cause of suicides. In reality, there are other D’s like death of a loved one, divorce and emotional desertion that can trigger a penetrating sense of loss and hopelessness.
While I’m not sure if Jews have a greater propensity for intense sadness, three women from Jewish families, Nataly Kogan, Margaret Feinberg and Daphne Merkin, have written books about fighting persistent sadness and their quest for a happier state of being. Their books, Happier Now, Fight Back with Joy, and This Close to Happiness, are all written in a persuasive memoir style that attempts to authenticate their writing on such a subjective topic as happiness.
FIGHT BACK WITH JOY by Margaret Feinberg
The stumper: I had physically survived (cancer). I was still breathing. My life had been spared, at least for now. So why did I feel sad? Why did I feel like I was still in mourning? Shouldn’t I be living in unspeakable, uncontrollable joy?
The experience of crisis: Ambulance chasers are a dime a dozen; rebuilders are hard to find. Our phones stopped vibrating. Knocks at the door grew further apart until they stopped altogether. Others we’d known for longer than a decade never spoke a word. Not even a “thinking of you” text message. Their absence stung.
Bonus: 5 things to say when you don’t know what to say, and 5 things those facing crisis can’t tell you.
HAPPIER NOW by Nataly Kogan
The stumper: Launching Happier wasn’t the end of my fear, stress, and anxiety. In fact, it was the beginning of a heart-wrenching deep dive into a pile of pain that I had ignored for years and that I had been hoping to escape by achieving my way into a sense of peace and endless bliss by way of my “I’ll be happy when…” mantra.
I’m only two chapters in but Kogan establishes credibility with me by writing about the irony of happiness eluding her while she was running Happier workshops.
If you think I told anyone about the fear and doubt I felt, you’d be wrong. My husband and a few close friends knew, but not fully. I told no one else. I’d never met a leader who shared their doubts or anxieties as they were experiencing them. I thought to share it would make me weak, and I did not want anyone to think I wasn’t up to the job.
I’m in on this book.
THIS CLOSE TO HAPPY by Daphne Merkin
The stumper: (Prologue, first sentence) Lately I’ve been thinking about the allure of suicide again – the way it says basta! to life…No more rage at the circumstances that have brought you down. No more dread. Most of all, no more disguise, no more need to wear a mask: “What, you, depressed? I never would have known.”
I find this so typical: when people are too detached, obtuse or fearful of intimacy to discern distress, they call it a disguise. I call it getting on with life till you don’t. Your desire to live doesn’t follow a schedule. You live till you don’t.
In Merkin’s words: You have lost the thread that pulled the circumstances of your life together. Nothing adds up and all you can think about is the raw nerve of pain that your mind has become…and how merciful it would be to yourself and others to extinguish this pain... the truth is that no one is interested in why you want to kill yourself, no one really believes that you will, until you've done it, and then it becomes morbidly intriguing to try and map it backwards.
Merkin has clinical depression that she attributes more to environmental causes than biological. As a longtime columnist for the New York Times, she writes with a uniquely provocative yet personal style that feels like a friend sharing her uncensored yet well-processed deep thoughts. It’s an intensity and depth that exposes vulnerability and fears and precisely the qualities I look for in real people and relationships.
Although Merkin lets you into her rich and deep mind through the many phases of her life, there seems to be no ‘exit’ signs for her until the last chapter:
If I can’t quite declare victory over my depression, I am giving it a run for its money, navigating around it, reminding myself that the opposite of depression is not a state of unimaginable happiness but a state of approximate contentment, of relative all-right-ness. (Never lacking in material comforts her entire life with beautiful holiday homes, she found company in) friends I have invited for the weekend are reading on deck chairs…It is not an exceptional scene but it is one that I cannot imagine having arranged until relatively recently, one that reqires me to take the helm instead of hoping that someone else will manage things for me.
Whoever thought I'd be this close to happy?
Life is indeed always a little chaotic, a little mad, a little sad which makes it incomprehensible that we should want to wait till we are all sorted out into neat packages before we step out to connect with others. In the meantime, we are missing out on joyous moments that can be found only when we invite others into places where there is legitimacy to be less than happy, and where mourning turns into dancing with the music of compassion.
Life is indeed always a little chaotic, a little mad, a little sad which makes it incomprehensible that we should want to wait till we are all sorted out into neat packages before we step out to connect with others. In the meantime, we are missing out on joyous moments that can be found only when we invite others into places where there is legitimacy to be less than happy, and where mourning turns into dancing with the music of compassion.