Would you rather be a happy simple-minded person or tortured genius?
This question was asked of me a few weeks ago by one of those cheery, spammy e-mail quizzes we all get and despite the fact that my answer was immediate and resolute, I have been thinking about it ever since.
I would rather be a happy, simple-minded person.
And yet.
If you had asked me this question 15 years ago my answer would have been just as immediate and resolute.
I would rather be a tortured genius.
And what has happened during the last 15 years to change my mind is the real question that has continued to haunt me long after I deleted that seemingly innocuous little e-mail.
In my teenage years and early 20s I vividly remember worrying that my uneventful middle class upbringing was insufficient preparation for a future I imagined as a famous and important writer. I was healthy. I had a strong and loving family. I was even, horrors! popular in high school. Could I create great art if I had never been, as Jean-Paul Sartre would describe it, the other? Didn’t I need to suffer?
Turns out the universe was happy to oblige whether I needed it or not.
In my mid-twenties, in the space of a year or so, my world started to fall apart. I had a cancer scare. My childhood home was rocked by turmoil and pain. The man upon whom I had depended for years abruptly cut me out of his life. My best friend died.
I moved into a one-room apartment in downtown Toronto. Determined to write the great Canadian novel, I waitressd, working the graveyard shift at a greasy spoon from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. five nights a week. I wrote furiously every afternoon.
It was the most miserable and tortured time in my life.
I never published the novel I wrote that winter: I know now that it’s not even very good. I also know that during that period of time every ounce of positive energy I had was expended, not creating great art, but surviving.
I have never slept in a gutter in Paris. I have never been addicted to drugs or alcohol. I have never spent years wallowing in filth and misery.
But I have suffered just enough to know that I don’t like it. I have felt enough pain to know that its constant presence is neither romantic, nor glamorous and that a tortured genius at the end of the day is…well…tortured.
I don’t want to be tortured.
I want to be happy, no matter how simplistic a goal that may have seemed in my youth. I’m not as interested these days in life’s grand operas as I am in life’s tiny movements.
The most successful life is the one most enjoyed. And every one of us, through the mere act of living, garners enough material on the human condition to write a million masterpieces: enough beauty, enough poignancy and yes, enough suffering.
There is a reason why boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back always has been, and always will be, the greatest story ever told.
A cynical person, perhaps even a younger version of me, would say that I have dumbed myself down: that I am deluded to think my middle class dramas and day-to-day trials are worthy of documentation.
But older I get the more I realize that life is just a series of moments. It’s how heavy or light you feel when you wake up in the morning. It’s how many laughs you share over dinner. It’s how often your heart swells with happiness in any given week.
And I have never forgotten the wasted, endless monotony of the hours and days I spent yearning for just a single happy moment. I have never forgotten how exhausting it is to daily teeter on the edge of a pit so vast and inviting it takes every ounce of strength not to slip down and fall into the blackness.
I may never be a genius, but I have finally figured out that there’s nothing simple-minded about the pursuit of happiness.
