How Dare You Be Happy When I am Miserable?

https://tessa.substack.com/p/how-dare-you-be-happy-when-i-am-miserable?

There is a lot of shaming going on.

Who is getting blasted? Naturally, it’s the little guy who breaks the “rules.”

What rules?

Any arbitrary rules du jour imposed by the world’s finest superpredators who are making ‘em, breaking ‘em, and paying for the “content” that instructs us whom to trust and what to think in order to maintain a worldview that maximizes their profits and ensures their lasting economic dominance, whether it requires a status quo or a “Great Reset.”

And the heart?

The heart picks up the tab. The pandemic of shaming people for feeling dignified as individuals or entitled to spiritual and physical sovereignty is nothing new. I remember that strange and toxic beast from my Soviet childhood. There was an implied idea of “them,” the “majority,” “the people,” an entity that was above any individual. It was personified by posters of workers with hammers, by old women full of pain caused by men, and by movie characters dying for the people. “They” were always struggling and thus always “right” because it was pain that made “them” pure and entitled to castigating others. Now I understand that it was a meme put together by the government from scraps of the existing culture—but back then it was just an unhappy, obligating entity that was there because it was a part of the universe. A dictatorship of the unhealed.

The moral case for “masking” the collective spiritual defeat and making it invisible by making everyone participate was so heavy on my soul that I ran away from the cultural bulldozer all the way to the United States. After many years of living in America, the land whose culture swings the other way and favors Big Commerce and Big Indifference, I forgot about my homeland’s mandatory pain. But now that the self-righteous bulldozer is here and at the service of the %0.0001 and their wallets, I am having none of it. I understand this beast’s toxicity no matter how it’s contextualized and spun for aching peasants, and I am really having none of it. This deliberate confusion of love for others with self-betrayal is an ancient weapon in a recent wrapper. I refuse. The heart is sacred.

So how does this poison work?

Back in the Soviet days, the need to punish the “sticker out” was internalized by adults so deeply that many pursued it without even thinking. A psychologist looking at the dynamic could say that it was “envy” or “generational trauma” born out of dealing with cruel masters and Christian guilt, the sentiment that was subsequently weaponized by the Soviet apparatchiks to keep the people down. A historian could say that centuries ago, a liar with a sword engaged in propaganda and convinced the people that joylessness was the will of God—and since that day, many liars had come along and robbed the people of their joy and sovereignty, to enrich and elevate themselves.

But on the inside, it was just an assumption that life was hard—and that it was deeply selfish and insulting to feel sovereign, to dress bold, to desire comfort that others didn’t have, or to act happy when other people felt sad or wronged—which other people always did, you could bet on that. In the language of emotional mechanics, it was a situation in which the ”majority” particles—dancing to the drum that encouraged defeat while singing own song of mutigenerational hardship—equalized the “minority” particles by forcing them to move and vibrate at the same speed and in the same direction, in order to keep the status quo of shared sadness and individual unimportance in the particle community. The odd, unrealistic happiness of one selfish particle insulted the equilibrium of the default collective struggle.

As a “sticker out” by birth, I suffered. I oscillated between being me and pleasing “them.” Being loyal to my soul brought me tremendous harmony but went against the grain and invoked aggression from my peers—and pleasing “them” required castrating my soul and made me dull. When I was little, the girls would get on my case for “smiling all the time” or “selfishly” outcompeting the existing academic queens in my class. Once I grew up, it became about my pants that unwittingly flattered my anatomy or the awful act of making out with a boyfriend on the bus. But the most traumatizing proposition was the need to feel guilty for my spiritual beliefs.

Overnight, the citizens were liberated from over seventy years of fanatical “scientific atheism.” Many desperately craved a filler for the soul—and thus they embraced the Orthodox church with matching fanaticism. I was trying to find my truth outside of the beaten path and I found that my quest came with a side effect of making others suffer by being who I was! I was a sticker out! It was as if my soul didn’t belong to me but was the property of “them,” the community, and “they” had the authority to moralize all over my beliefs because the only correct way to see the world was theirs!

The dilemma was impossible: Be happy and thus contribute to the suffering of those around you—because your freedom causes them real pain—or submit your spirit to the communal fest of unimportance. If you choose the former, you are authentic and alone—and if you choose the latter, you betray your sacred heart, and you are forced to spend the rest of your life trying to fill the void with approval of your peers who were just ready to murder you for your authenticity but who will now praise you for being good and not sticking out. And once you check your soul at the door, with time, you’ll surely join the army of equalizers—because the void hurts.