Aggressively Happy by Joy Marie Clarkson

Author:Joy Marie Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Inspiration;Joy—­Religious aspects—­Christianity;Happiness—­Religious aspects—­Christianity;REL012040;REL012130;REL012070
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Sitcom of Life

Recently, it struck me that I enjoy stories as frequently as I eat food (which is to say, very consistently! Food and stories are both great!). On my bedside table, there is an unruly pile of books: a novel (a reread), a collection of short stories (riveting!), a travel book (a genre I’ve recently discovered I love), and a Bible. When I can’t sleep (often), I pick up one and read till my eyes grow weary. I have two audiobooks going at any given time. And then there are the Netflix series. Right now I’m working my way through a legal drama, but I’m not always so sophisticated; more often than not it is something that makes me laugh, something about a plucky young heroine overcoming odds and discovering romance and/or literary success (yes, I’m fully aware this is wish fulfillment). My consumption of stories is somewhat compulsive, but I think it is a compulsion most people share to at least some extent.

From news to Netflix to novels, we surround ourselves with stories.

And we tell them too.

You may not think you’re a storyteller, but when someone asks, “How are you?” all of us instinctively begin to spin a story. We don’t usually list bullet points of events and outcomes; we tell the story of our day, stringing each event along a temporal string, each moment of suspense, tension, resolution, humor, or excitement another pearl on the strand. As a particularly striking example of this, I always think of a friend of mine in grad school who described her life as “the sitcom.” I would come back to my dorm room (which I rarely locked), to find her sitting on my overstuffed chair ensconced in my crocheted blanket. “You’ll never believe what happened on the sitcom today.” A riveting description of her day told as an absurdist situational comedy flecked with twenty-something pathos inevitably followed. We named the recurring characters “coffee shop crush,” “shift dictator,” “the bonnie laird.” When the well-known villain appeared, I’d shake my head knowingly and mutter, “Oh her again,” and when there was a new installment in the ongoing love saga with the coffee shop crush who didn’t know she existed, I leaned in, breathless.

We don’t live in the same place anymore, but the sitcom is ongoing. When we catch up over FaceTime and learn that something particularly ridiculous has happened to either of us (as it often does), we’ll knowingly roll our eyes and say, “The sitcom writers have really gone off the rails this year.”

The stories we tell about our days become the stories we tell about our lives. We develop a habit of telling our stories that casts a mood, an ethos, an Instagram filter over how we see our lives, and how we invite others to see us.

I have two friends who have practiced telling themselves very different stories.

One of them has had an objectively difficult life. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she grew up tossed between an unstable, narcissistic parent and a parent too grieved to know what to do with her.

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