My Happiness Letter

I found myself arguing this week that, actually, self-reported happiness is not as useful a measure of “real happiness” as you might think. I recognize how problematic this stance is, because if you ask someone if they are happy and they say they are, then who are you to tell them they aren’t happy? I struggle with this in particular with my history in Mormonism. For me, part of the trauma of leaving Mormonism is the sense I have that I am no longer happy, because I *believed* I was happy as a Mormon wife and mother and I would have violently shouted down anyone who told me that I wasn’t (I had plenty of people in grad school at Princeton who told me I wasn’t and I dismissed them, and the same experience happened over and over again when I was writing openly about Mormonism for HuffPo and doing interviews about my mystery novels).

Here's the problem: brainwashing people into thinking that they are happy is NOT happiness. Forcing people to repeat over and over again aloud and in public in communities in which they are judged by their self-reported happiness is NOT happiness. And also: humans have certain needs. Whether or not you know you have these needs, whether or not you can articulate these needs, whether or not you are allowed to express these needs to others around you, whether or not you can see any way to meet these needs—all irrelevant to the reality that you are human and you have needs.

Other people cannot take away your needs for water and food, for instance. They can convince you that you don’t need food or water. They can convince you to participate in your own starvation. They can convince you that you are happy starving to death. They can force you (by various means) to profess that you WANT to starve to death and that no one can stop you from doing what you want to do. They can convince you that God wants you to starve to death or that some other omniscient being demands your starvation. They can even tell you that if you don’t starve to death, your children will suffer. None of this matters to the reality that you have human needs, and food and water are among those needs and depriving you of these needs should not be called happiness, no matter how brainwashed you are.

Since I grew up Mormon, I am well aware of how loudly I insisted that I was NOT oppressed. After all, I went to Princeton University and got a PhD. I “willingly” participated in Mormonism, after being raised as a Mormon and repeatedly threatened by way of examples of what happens to those who leave Mormonism and are rejected by their entire family and every person they’ve ever known. And I do want to believe women (and men) who say what makes them happy.

But somehow, I also think that it should be illegal to deny people of human needs. Among those needs, nearly as high as food and water, are things that I was deprived of and not even allowed to name as my needs, including self-actualization and the very real need to have power over my own life. I had the right to vote in American politics, but I had no right to ask for representation in my religious community. I had no way of having my voice heard in any meaningful way because men are in charge in Mormonism in an extreme way and women are told to listen to men and that anything they need, men will take care of because men hear God’s voice and women who aren’t obedient are not listening to the true order of God’s universe.

It makes me shudder a bit now to remember how utterly I believed these rules. It also makes me sick to see how much it damaged me not to have a job for so much of my life, to be dependent on a man for all of my needs. It warped my thinking about myself and my own capacities because I never got feedback about my intelligence or abilities outside of the Mormon church’s system, where I was often told that I was “wrong” because I was so very intelligent and capable, and the men could see how dangerous I was to the system, if I was allowed to step outside of my box.

All of this is to say that I don’t believe in self-reported happiness and yet I also don’t want to point fingers at women and tell them that they don’t know their own reality. For one thing, this doesn’t really help. The people who pointed fingers at me were pretty much the last people I felt I could go to when I was in that slow stage, taking baby steps away from Mormon orthodoxy. I felt vaguely ashamed of the idea of asking for small help, even though that was all I could accept that I needed, because I knew that what would happen would be this barrage of “I told you so” and then more and more information about how awful Mormonism was. I couldn’t hear that. I couldn’t bear to accept that my entire life had been based on lies and that so much had been stolen from me by those very effective lies.

Which is all to say that we need to believe women. And that happiness is nothing other than us believing we are happy.

Except when that is not at all sufficient to happiness.

No one else should get to tell us if we are unhappy or happy, or if we are deluded and stupid and blinded by patriarchy (which we basically all are, inside or outside of Mormonism).

But also, sometimes an outside view of yourself can be as useful as it is painful. Because there can be some very simple parts of happiness that you are being denied and being told are nonsense while at the same time you may be told that x is what makes you happy when x doesn’t make you happy at all—it makes you miserable, but you can’t say that out loud yet because it will cost you everything to do so.