Andrew’s First Law of Unhappiness - People in Unhappy Circumstances Will Remain in Unhappy Circumstances Until Acted Upon by an Internal or (More Usually) External Force.
Have you ever had this conversation with a friend or loved one?
YOU: How’s life?
THEM: Eh.
YOU: What’s up?
THEM: (Job / Romantic Relationship / Friendship) is bad. Like, really bad. Draining me.
YOU: This would be the (Job / Romantic Relationship / Friendship) that has been bad for…five years now?
THEM: Yeah…
YOU: You gotta get out of that!
THEM: I know…
Of course you’ve had that conversation. We all have - most of us have been on either side of it. We possess the ability to be super unhappy and unwilling to change our circumstances at the same time. In order to break the inertia of our “lives at rest,” we either have to muster up the internal power to do something drastic - a break-up, a job-change, etc. - or wait around until something happens to us.
Now. Why do we do this? Here’s my entirely unscientific, I-totally-do-not-have-a-degree-in-this* take on things.
First Application of Andrew’s First Law of Unhappiness - Fear of Change
You probably saw this one coming. You could blindfold yourself and randomly select any book from the Self-Help or Religion section at Barnes and Noble (or scroll for two seconds through Facebook/Instagram) and come up with some version of this. So I won’t spend too much time here - other than to say that, yes, change sucks. It’s scary. And there are lots of ways to help yourself overcome it. I found this book fairly helpful. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Okay, moving on.
Second Application of Andrew’s First Law of Unhappiness - Stick-With-It-Ness
Here are some things that many Americans believe, even if they never say it out loud.
That America Is the Best Place That Could Possibly Ever Be (despite evidence to the contrary).
That God is On Our Side and Nobody Else’s (despite the fact that everybody thinks that, particularly the people who all share the same Abrahamic God. How fun is that?).
That Rich People are Rich Because They Deserve To Be Rich (and the corollary - that Poor People are Poor Because They Deserve to be Poor).
That America Will Last Forever Because It Is The Best (and Also God Loves It) (connected to the first two wrong ideas, and also highly unlikely given the last 10,000 years of recorded human history).
All of these ideas are bad and wrong, and stumble forth from a bubbling stew of American Exceptionalism, overwrought patriotism, myth-making, and performative religiosity that surfaces in this country from time to time.**
Here’s another -
If You Work at Something Hard Enough, and Want it Bad Enough, and Stick With it Long Enough, And Go About it in the Correct Manner, You Will (Probably) Get What You Want. If You Don’t, That is On YOU (Or, It Isn’t God’s Plan for You***).
This idea is as American as Systemic Abuse of Brown People****, and is the subject of my very round-about**** final Fertility Post. You see this notion crop up in tons of interesting ways. It’s tied into the legends of the founding fathers. It haunts pioneers of westward expansion. It’s connected to weird ideas of masculinity (real men tuff things out). It shows up in American job culture (don’t quit - stay at your job and try to fix things from within). It shows up in religion (you have to stay in dysfunctional or abusive marriages and try to work things out or maybe you didn’t pray hard enough or maybe that just isn’t what God wanted).
I could go on, but you get it. And this idea - that hard work and suffering can get you what you want - is woven through why Rachael and I spent three years trying to get pregnant - first by halting birth control, then through careful planning, then through careful planning + medication, and finally through invasive, expensive, low-success-rate procedures. This process became increasingly draining - especially because the further into the process we got, the lower our chances became.
While I’m happy to report that our marriage weathered it just fine, we each suffered greatly in our own ways. In early January of 2020, we looked into the future and saw only more suffering - a final IUI procedure, the emotional ramifications of considering a sperm donor******, and the insurmountable financial hurdles of IVF treatments.
So we gave up.
And you know what our overwhelming sensation was? It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t regret. It certainly wasn’t more suffering. It was relief. It was the beginning of acceptance. It opened up the space in our lives to mourn.
I can’t tell you how good it felt to give up. And now that we have, we can both see how much this journey took from us - physically, spiritually, emotionally, and creatively.
I can’t speak for Rachael on all counts. She has a slightly different take on what I’m about to say, and that’s fine (from the beginning, this series has been about my take on things - and my take on things is almost always not Rachael’s take on things).
But I can say that, personally, I wish we’d given up sooner. I’m happy to have this weight off my shoulders. I’m excited to find some emotional space to paint, write poetry and prose, start training for my next adventure, and try to dig myself out of the depression that’s haunted me for the last six months. And most of all, I’m looking forward to hanging out with my wife without the specter of fertility haunting us.
We’re going to take some time to breath. And at some point in the future, we’ll start to look at adoption. And as we all know, that process tends to run very smoothly and rarely has any kind of serious emotional ramifications.
In the meantime, we’ll get back to our work - attempting to be well-rounded, decent, kind human beings with more on their plates than self-replication. Maybe we’ll make some art. Rachael has a few choir performances coming up, and she’s a lead in Steel Magnolias at the community theater. I’ve got three separate novels gathering dust in google docs, not to mention some poems and paintings bouncing around in my noggin.
Yeah. Let’s make some art. I’m told it Saves Lives. I tend to agree.
*Unless you consider a BFA in Film and Television and a career in storytelling of various types a reasonable qualification to be discussing philosophical matters. Actually, I might be making this argument. A study of storytelling can get you a long way towards understanding why we live our monkey lives the way we do.
**We are in that stew now, in case you haven’t noticed.
***I have some pretty serious issues with the “God’s Plan” aspect of all this, as you might imagine. We won’t get into it today.
****I was going to say “apple pie,” but, well, you know.
*****sorry
******We still don’t know what, if anything, is keeping us from having kids, but there’s a big chance it’s on my end. Rachael thinks it’s on her end. See how much this sucks, ya’ll?
NOTES: This post is the final in a series of essays on fertility. You can read the first here, the second here, and the third here. As always, feel free to share this on social media or via email. My goal with this series is not to “get myself out there” but rather to offer my experiences and thoughts to those going through similar issues.