I can’t make up my mind about whether unhappiness is a fundamentally lonely or social experience. On the one hand, it’s the most collective of all human emotions, the one true commonality. No matter who we are, how we grew up, or where we live on the planet, we’re all susceptible to the same fears, desires, and wants — translation: we’re all pretty tight with misery and suffering.

On the other hand, we all seem to concoct our own unique brew of unhappiness, everyone wallowing in the isolation of his or her own special woe. His divorce is the world’s worst divorce to ever take place, her miscarriage is the single most devastating, unlike any other she can imagine. To a certain extent, it’s true — the divorce is in fact the worst ever for him, for the simple reason that it’s his divorce. Same with her miscarriage, her mother’s death, his cancer.

So the way I see it, the pain of a breakup — that raw, dark loneliness and despair that makes you feel like nothing on earth could ever be right and good again — must be shared by everyone who’s ever been in love with someone else — which is just about everyone (excepting a decent portion of the financial district). It’s OK to take a little solace knowing that millions of people before me have stared at the ceiling until 4 AM, wandered the sidewalks in a daze, eaten next to nothing for two days and then compensated with an entire red velvet cake. There’s just no way that I’m the only heartbreak casualty alive who’s ever spent a Friday night on a floor model at Crate & Barrel crying into her palms. (”Do you think they didn’t have the color she wanted?” a would-be sympathizer asks his Prada-clad wife. She grabs his hand and marches away as quickly as possible.)

No matter how lonely it feels, scores of people have felt this way before me, and plenty more will after. It doesn’t change anything, really — but somehow, it helps.

This piece also appeared in The Huffington Post.

A month ago, I woke up feeling peaceful for the first time in months. I’m 29, I had just closed on my first apartment, and I was leaving a five-year relationship that, despite my dogged hopes of marriage, had become a stew pot of resentment and anger. While scores of articles eagerly inform me that unmarried men are as scarce as a renewable energy source, I’ve stubbornly refused to write the last five years off as a colossal failure. Instead, I’ve been throwing all my energy toward taking responsibility for my part in the relationship, learning what I can from it, and moving on with life.

Then, like every other white-collar woman north of the equator, I read this. At first, I laughed it off. It was assumptive. It was illogical. It was judgmental. It reeked of the “It is INEVITABLE that all women feel this way, and if they don’t think they do then they’re just in DENIAL!” school of social theory — never much of a recipe for enlightenment, for yourself or anyone else. So I shrugged, chocked the piece up to yet another woman existentially disappointed by men, and went back to my inner harmony. Read the rest of this entry »

We like to give generations plenty of labels. It’s a little absurd, slapping a sticker on millions of people that just happened to be born in the same time range and proclaiming that they’re somehow all alike. But we do it anyway, and then spend our time finding examples of how our designated labels are true (and, let’s be honest, sometimes they are - though whether it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy is an open question).

There’s the Baby Boomers - I won’t even go into all the labels they carry, Lord knows there are enough of them who’ll be more than happy to go down the list for you — there’s the “Generation X” in between (which you can read plenty about here), and then there’s us, the Boomer spawn. We’re “shifty,” “unfocused,” “spoiled”; we “lack dedication” (a half-assed euphemism for “lazy”). On the whole, we’re apparently a group of incessant navel gazers who can barely work a doorknob without wondering what’s in it for them. (As an aside, what’s so inherently wrong with navel gazing? I find it to be a pretty engaging pastime. All sorts of interesting stuff in there.)

There’s not much point in constructing some painstaking argument to disprove all this - it’s sort of like building a detailed case to show that unicorns don’t exist. But one thing you do have to give my generation: we’re superstars at dealing with change. We change up everything in our lives, on a regular basis - cities, countries, jobs, careers, hair colors, sexual orientations, the list goes on.

So maybe it’s the subconscious aftereffects of my generation’s labels that led me to change my job, my apartment, and my relationship status all at the same time. Or maybe it was just that life was feeling pretty damn stagnant, and I was sick of waiting for external factors to “fix it” or “make it better” (hear that, Boomers? How’s that new Maserati treating you?)

So after a few weeks of getting in touch with my Inner Sloth (apparently my Inner Sloth likes eating M&Ms for breakfast and reading Caroline Knapp), I’ve unpacked my boxes and started a job as the deputy web editor at Discover magazine. As for the rest, who knows how it’ll work itself out. But for now, I’m clutching safely to my sanity — ’cause my generation is expert in coping with an uncertain future.

We tend to do things for reasons. We need to pay the bills, so we go to work. We need sustenance, so we hit Dunkin Donuts in the morning. We want to keep our jobs, so we sneak in up the freight elevator and through the back hall when we’re running late.

In fact, when it comes down to it, just about every action I take can be explained by a reason: I don’t want to end up with live ebola strains on my hands, so I don’t touch railings on the Subway. I know Cat likes to hack up hairballs under my bed at 3 AM, so I shut her outside when I go to sleep. I want to keep my muscles from becoming hunks of gelatinous goo, so I detach myself from the couch and exercise (occasionally, anyway).

And then, sometimes, for a change, it’s nice to do something for no reason at all. Which is why I’ll be a guest on Sirius’ Maxim Radio station today from 1 to 1:30 EST. I’ll admit, the absence of reason wasn’t originally the plan — but sometimes you gotta roll with the set schedule. While I’ve assured the show’s producers that I am no expert in, well, anything really, they’re apparently still convinced that a half hour of me prattling will entertain at least one of their listeners. Let’s just hope no one shows them this. Or this.

I’m great at developing relationships in my life. Most of them are meaningful, involved, and require a lot of time and effort. Granted, they aren’t all with actual human beings, but that’s somewhat beside the point.

Take Cat, for example. We have a complex and dynamic bond, mostly consisting of her making her needs known and me rushing to accommodate them. She’s the only creature on Earth I feel comfortable relating to in an entirely servile way - I will drop anything, at any time, to get her a dried turkey treat or change the odor filter in her litter box, and never once expect her to return the favor. We have conversations, back and forth, about all manner of things - that whole language thing is absent, but since when is language necessary for communication?

Sure, I’ve read all the studies about people who anthropomorphize animals, how these sad, deluded folks are “socially stunted” and “tend towards loneliness” and “therefore seek to humanize pets to fill their own inner void.” Rubbish. Cat needs me, and I need her, and (in my head, anyway) we have hours of equable and deeply mutual repartee. She says “mew,” and of course I know she means: “Honestly, Melissa, the fact that Tom didn’t respond to your e-mail about that story idea means absolutely nothing about its relevance or potential value, or your abilities as a writer.”

Then there’s my relationship with this blog. It’s mine - I created it, I control it, I am Master of its Universe (I love telling that to my students: “You are God of your blog.” It sounds so wonderfully epic). Things were great at first in the relationship. We got along so well, with me pouring my guts into its warm Wordpress embrace, while it was always ready to listen, show endless patience for my obsessive editing, and then share what I’d told it with anyone else who wanted to hear. We were so happy together, in the mutual rhythm of being needed by someone(thing).

And then, somewhere along the line, things got rocky. “You’re not doing me justice” it started squawking into the back of my head while I was in the middle of 6 other things, all of which seemed more important than blogging. “You don’t pay enough attention to me any more, and when you are paying attention it’s like you’re not even there. You don’t give me the time and energy I deserve. I am totally and wholly not loved enough in this relationship.” Read the rest of this entry »

Nope, this blog hasn’t been abandoned, left to float for an un-posted eternity through the endless folds of cyberspace. Look for updates soon!

There’s something deeply flawed about Valentine’s Day. It’s surprising, given that we’re talking about an entire holiday devoted to having fun with someone you find attractive, consuming decadent food and alcohol, exchanging cards, gifts, and statements of devotion, and, in all likelihood, getting laid. From that perspective, the idea that a ritual like this could be a bad thing seems ridiculous.

Still, here we sit, cursing the Hallmark executive who injected this holiday into an artery of mainstream culture. Maybe it’s the giant chasm between what Valentine’s Day should be — a day of celebrating love and expressing one’s caring and devotion toward others — versus what it is: a deformed bastard child of social one-up-ism and shameless merchandising. Somehow, we’ve sapped the joy from the one day of the year actually designated for feeling safe and loved, and turned it into a hollow husk of buying, obligation, and inevitable disappointment. The obligatory flowers and chocolates followed by the forced dinner at a restaurant slammed with couples “paying for their romantic experience;” the relentless third party pressure to give the “right” present, eat the “right” gourmet victuals, wear the “right” lacy lingerie; the face-rubbing in the fact that, no matter what, you will never attain the idyllic relationship bliss of those couples in the ads for diamonds and luxury cars that run every 3 minutes throughout the month of February.

And then, of course, there’s the “significance” stamp that’s slapped onto the front cover. Female? Single? Welcome to the one day of the year that will crank open your throat and force feed you its recipe for self-debasement. Just try not digesting the insecurity of being alone, the unshakable sense that something deep and intangible is wrong with you, the socially-mandated idea that some cosmic joke or genetic deficiency must have left you and you alone destined for permanent exile from intimacy. What’s not to love?

Still, despite it all, there’s some solace: any holiday that condones abject chocolate-gorging can’t be all bad.

New Yorkers aren’t the happiest bunch. For any number of reasons (working too much, subsisting on mercury-laden tuna, living in $3,000-a-month concrete boxes surrounded by two thousand other concrete boxes at even more laughable prices) those who chose to live here don’t tend to be the happy-go-lucky type.

In a way, it’s a matter of self selection: those who are born here and stay have the unhappiness already implanted, while the rest of us don’t move here to be happy — we come to be successful, to be big, to beat out everyone else, and chase and devour the single biggest carrot that society can deliver. We want more and we want better, and until then, everything’s crap. Give us your neurotics, your depressives, your grim and fidgety, hypercritical and melancholy, uptight and panicky. Millions of smart and ambitious people packed in together, all on a default setting of anger, dejection, or disdain.

March around in this soupy funk long enough, and it gets pretty comfortable — kind of like plodding through raw sewage until the smell doesn’t bother you. We get used to our unhappiness, to the point where its absence feels like a lost limb.

So on the rare occasion when we have cause for collective joy (like, say, a massive Superbowl upset leading to a heartwarming New York victory, with the added bonus of delivering a crushing loss for a cadre of cheating thugs), we can barely figure out how to claw our way out of the perma-gloom to properly celebrate:

“Wow, what an amazing comeback!”
“Yeah, but the game sucked ’til then. I wasn’t even paying attention in the 4th quarter.”

“Eli Manning was amazing!”
“He better be - he was garbage all through the regular season.”

“Did you go to a Superbowl party?”
“Yeah, for a couple minutes - I barely made it out, I was so tired from working all weekend.”

“Are you going to the parade today?”
“Are you kidding? The weather is horrible, I’ve been sick for 3 weeks with that thing that’s going around, and I have about 18 hours of work to do today.”

“So I guess it’s a relief, then, that the season is over?”
“What?? How can you say that?? What will I do without football? It gave me something to be happy about!”

I’m not smart every day. Or even 85% of days. I’d lay the odds at around 5/6ths. Maybe that’s being generous.

I’ve learned to accept this, after countless mornings spent poring through WebMD to see if there’s some way my brain cells could have evaporated overnight. Writers love to flounder in self-created dramas about “the lost gift,” wrapping themselves in the absurd but easily-digestible story, “I’ve lost it! It’s gone! I’ll never write anything decent again!” But my mental lapses take it to an entirely new level — forget compelling sentences, I’m lucky if I can write down a phone number with all the digits intact.

Other days, everything just gels — the neurotransmitters are firing, the blood vessels are flowing, and all those curly little gray matter cells are slurping their chemical cocktails and pumping out lucid thoughts. Things seem easy — the day breezes by. Sometimes I’ll even write something that seems reasonably intelligent (at least, for the few seconds it takes for someone on the Internet to inform me otherwise, often employing one of the many synonyms for “suck”).

But on lapse days, it’s like the universe has conspired against any attempt at smarts. I can’t finish a sentence. Words on the page/screen may as well be backwards hieroglyphics. Doing laundry is an act of high-impact cognition. I try to come up with reasons for the sudden loss — I’m in shock from hitting my head on the coffee table last night; I’m anemic; I’ve unknowingly ingested some brain-feeding parasite. But the truth is that there’s really no clear explanation.

The problem is that I, like most people in the technologized white collardom of the modern work force, make a living by getting up every morning and putting on some semblance of smartness. Write cogent e-mails, type something clever, make some obscure connection, turn some phrase, all in the (often vain) hope of being taken seriously as a useful member of society. As such, waking up to find that I’m on the brink of special needs is a pretty major issue.

So I’ve started calling these “dumb days” — partly as a comforting reminder that it’s only temporary, and also because it helps stave off panic over whether those “substance awareness” lectures in high school were true, and that second screwdriver last night actually did kill off my final remaining brain cell.

But there is consolation to be had: Even on the dumbest days, when the English language feels like a Sisyphean rock, I can rest assured that, at that very moment, other people far smarter and infinitely more successful than me are saying really stupid shit, too.

People hate Christmas. They really do. When I was a child (a time period that includes the majority of my life so far, including the odd day or two in the present), I would listen to adults talk about how much they loathed the holidays, how the whole business was one earth-shattering headache, and all the other B.S. things adults say to rob children of that irrepressible (until it’s repressed) joy at being alive. I figured the constant holiday kvetching was some adult code, a secret language that let grownups conceal their glee over lights, presents, trees, and bottomless tins of sugar-laden junk food.

But now, as I trudge through the gulag of Penn Station, dodging sharp elbows and kamikaze suitcases, watching grumpy hordes line up to march single-file into dark, smelly escalators and pack into seats covered in earwax-scented upholstery, I realize that it was true. Here we are at the year’s only time of designated joy, and hundreds of adults sit in one collective shitty mood, traveling down the Eastern Seaboard to their homes and loved ones for the year’s designated “most wonderful time.”

As the train barrels South, one universal rule applies: the closer we get to our destinations, the further we revert to the angst, fears and stories of our respective childhoods. A woman searching for empty seats in Trenton starts screaming at her neighbors, her husband, anyone who will listen, with the desperation of someone who learned at 5 that she’d never get what she wanted unless she raised hell. A goateed hipster in a zip-up hoodie shoves a yuppie over who gets prime real estate in the overhead luggage bin, a classic application of the schoolyard lesson: “better to be the bullier than the bullied.” A businessman whines into a cell phone that “I aaalllways get stuck doing all the grocery shopping for everyone else,” his voice greased with oldest child resentment over having to constantly care for siblings.

At last, the train pulls into its final stop, and the terminal ramps flood with crabby masses clamoring for the exit doors. Sitting in the doorway, his location forcing everyone on the train to pass him, is a six-foot-four man in a Santa suit. He’s there for no discernible reason, neither collecting money nor wearing an Amtrak name tag. He’s just standing in the doorway, greeting every scowling face that races past. His lumberjack build forces our initial attention, but it’s his beatific grin that keeps it.

“Happy holidays, everybody,” he booms. “Peace and love to all. That’s what I say: peace and love. Why else did we all just trek all this way in some crazy little train car?”

The victimized yuppie cracks a smile next to me.

“A smile! I see one out there. An actual smile!” anonymous Santa crows. “What’s say we all try it? Hell, this holiday time is gonna come every year, like it or not. It’s gonna be crazy every year, like it or not. We can spend it unhappy, or we can spend it happy. I know which one I choose. Merry Christmas!”

The last two words seem directed at me (though it’s impossible to make clear eye contact through all the waxy fake Santa hair). For the first time that day, even as the suitcases and elbows make human mincemeat out of my limbs, I grin.