The 'Happy' Question

By Harrison S. Key

I sat at just one more cafe in a life of cafes, hoping to finish yet another cover letter for a tenure-track job, before heading home. I was stuck on a sentence attempting to articulate my philosophy of teaching. I knew I should have the search committee drooling by that point, "This man is a genius. Hire him. Love him. Pay him in euros."

First, I needed a sentence. All I had so far was "Me teach good." I stared at the idiot sentence for two hours, which is probably how my mind drifted upriver two years.

"Are you happy?" my best friend had asked. We were in a boat, in the middle of a 100-mile float trip. One of us was drunk. I had just finished my comprehensive exams, and my buddy wanted to know if I was excited about my prospects. In the following year, I would defend my dissertation, find a job, and begin The Rest of My Life.

Was I happy? The question seemed irrelevant. Give me a beer. "Are you happy?" is a question you ask unhappy people -- not me. I was on my way to the perfect life.

As soon as I started college as an undergraduate, I knew my future. I had a few intelligent, kind, funny professors, and the job looked easy enough. You get to read all day and occasionally stand up and share your knowledge with the world. Yes, I had the ego for that, and I liked the idea of knowledge. "I will get me some of that," I said to myself, so I went to graduate school.

"I don't want to hate my life like you do," I had told my dad at the dinner table, the day I announced I was going to be a professor and not a lawyer. My dad was Willy Loman, a salesman with a big smile and a big, sad heart. He saw money in me, a life he had never had, but Biff wanted to be a teacher.

I was in love with acting and writing and philosophy, so theater is what I studied. Easy enough.

Five years after entering graduate school, there I sit, in that boat with my beer, wondering if I'm happy. I have to be. That's why I went to graduate school. Another year later and I'm in full graduation regalia, still wondering.

But what else could I be? I was a teacher, a student, changing the world, thinking up thoughts, writing them down, telling anyone who would listen and some people who wouldn't. I clocked 90 hours a week, doing my damage at Waffle Houses and Corner Diners. I ate books instead of food, writing in the margins, throwing them across the room when they were bad, sleeping with them when they were good.

My papers won awards, my plays won awards, and my parents were proud, even if it wasn't law. Was I happy? Ask anybody who knows me. You can't be this good at something and not be happy. Which is why I was the only one at commencement who saw the dark green cloud hovering over my mortarboard.

Three months later, it's the end of the summer, and I'm in New York City wondering if I'm happy. But I was a new man, at a conference in the Marriott Marquis right on Times Square, the singularity of the Theater Universe, where we were workshopping one of my plays. For the cherry on top, I had a good job at a big state university.

I couldn't ask for more. Except for maybe a wife. Wait. I had just gotten married! How did that happen? My life was perfect. Except I wanted to quit smoking. So I quit. Wow! My life was perfect. A degree. A play. A job. A wife. My lungs. What else does a growing boy need?

So why was I wandering around Times Square at 3 in the morning hoping a cab would run me over.

Maybe I was overwhelmed with success, my heart heavy with gladness. It's a scientific fact -- sometimes you get so happy that you get sad. I would feel better when I had tenure, I thought, when I had really contributed to the Great Conversation.

I could have attributed the deep, dark melancholy to my being one of those tormented geniuses, but I opted for just plain old depression, which is the same thing as tormented genius without all the responsibility of actually being smart.

Four months later, and I'm in a cafe working on a cover letter for a job I don't want. Everything in my life had gone according to plan, and all I wanted was something else.

Me teach good. Me get job. Me kill self.

I had stopped asking the "happy" question. Then something happened. Right there in that cafe, trying to prove to some search committee why I was a good person, I saw the answer.

That cover letter was an appeal for sanctuary. I wasn't looking for a job. I was looking for asylum. The inveterate question had nothing to do with theater, with teaching, with my job, with my dad. Those things are good things. My problem was the outside world. I was afraid of it. So I had been hiding.

Fast forward 15 minutes, and I'm in the kitchen, telling my wife.

"I'm not happy," I said.

"I know," she said.

And it was a very happy day. Then we had dinner.

Why did it take me so long to admit that academe was never going to make me happy? Because I had been institutionalized, like Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption. He spent a life in prison and knew its rules, and his release into the outside world was just too much. He hated it enough to hang himself in a boarding house. I bet he wasn't happy in prison, either, but at least it was home.

Was that my problem, too? I had spent a life in education. I was carried to term in the classroom, while mom taught English to seventh graders. At birth, I was deposited in the diapers-only section of a preschool. Thirty years later, I remain in school, sans the diaper.

The similarities between prison and academe are several. Both places have tiny rebellions and mutinies, mostly insignificant, sometimes violent. Most people are involved in sports. Everybody else reads. Lots of free concerts. There's also very bad pay. Squalid living conditions. Remedial classes. Drug use. Unusual carnal activity. Tattoos.

The most common parallel, though, is one's inability to leave either after years of regimen.

But you can leave. Here's how.

Write down all of the reasons you're in academe -- all the reasons you chose this life, the things you like about it, what you can't live without, what makes you an awesome teacher, all those things that make you think you're happy.

Now write down all the reasons why you might be unhappy -- the complaints about your students, the misgivings about your college, the grievances with your discipline, and job, and life. You have to have some or you wouldn't have read this far.

Then take both of those lists and mail them to your mom, because she's the only one who cares.

The thing is, if you get far enough to start writing things down like that, you aren't happy. Nobody can tell you why you're unhappy, most of all you, but that is the first step. Admit it.

Admit that you don't like your students sometimes. Admit that you get tired of teaching the F.O.I.L. method or Oedipus Rex to dopes on dope. Admit that you love summers off but get suicidal by August. Admit that you think some of your colleagues are really nuts but you smile and agree because, why not? Admit that political correctness makes you gassy. Admit that you're a little upset that your students will make twice your salary upon graduating, even if they can't read. Admit that your department looks less like Dead Poets Society and more like Lord of the Flies. Admit that you think leaving will mean selling out to The Man, or The Bourgeoisie, or Wal-Mart, or whatever demon you think you hate.

Admit that you're scared to death but ready for something new.

A lot has happened since that night in the cafe, when I saw my unhappiness around me and behind me and stretching out to the end of the world. I'm not going to belabor how the story ends. That's not important.

What's important is that you answer the question, too.

Am I happy? Hey, dummy, it's a rhetorical question.