Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice.

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.

I didn’t want to disappear. I didn’t want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape – but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out.

The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is that it prompts reflection. Read on its own that is an absurd sentence. But as I try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream . . .

What the Americans, in their constitution, call ‘the right to the pursuit of happiness’ (please note, not ‘the right to happiness’), is the right to swim upstream, salmon-wise.

Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy

If the sun is shining, stand in it – yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass – they have to – because time passes.

What you are pursuing is meaning – a meaningful life. There’s the hap – the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn’t fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use – that’s going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.

anger that can kill you and others, and that threatens to overwhelm everything. We can’t negotiate with that powerful but enraged part of us until we teach it better manners – which means getting it back in the bottle to show who is really in charge. This isn’t repression, but it is about finding a container. In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren’t let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Sometimes a whole day went by before the punishment was meted out, and so crime and punishment seemed disconnected to me, and the punishment arbitrary and pointless. I didn’t respect them for it. I didn’t fear it after a while. It did not modify my behaviour. It did make me hate them – not all the time – but with the hatred of the helpless; a flaring, subsiding hatred that gradually became the bed of the relationship. A hatred made of coal, and burning low like coal, and fanned up every time there was another crime, another punishment.

He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn’t look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can’t grow up. They can get older, but they can’t grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won’t hit love in the face.

Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside – and that structure is built in part by what has happened on the outside. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame, and I too am the wild and the tame. I am domestic, but only if the door is open. And I guess that is the key – no one is ever going to lock me in or lock me out again. My door is open and I am the one who opens it.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too – a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.

When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.

Mrs Winterson’s god was the God of the Old Testament and it may be that modelling yourself on a deity who demands absolute love from his ‘children’ but thinks nothing of drowning them (Noah’s Ark), attempting to kill the ones who madden him (Moses), and letting Satan ruin the life of the most blameless of them all (Job), is bad for love.

She was always striking me down, and then making a cake to put things right, and very often after a lockout we’d walk down to the fish and chip shop the next night and sit on the bench outside eating from the newspaper and watching people come and go. For most of my life I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love.

It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.

Were we endlessly ransacking the house, the two of us, looking for evidence of each other? I think we were – she, because I was fatally unknown to her, and she was afraid of me. Me, because I had no idea what was missing but felt the missing-ness of the missing.

Why I am not what she wants. What I want or why. But there is something I know: ‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’ She nodded. She seemed to understand and I thought, really, for that second, that she would change her mind, that we would talk, that we would be on the same side of the glass wall. I waited. She said, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’

The best thing about taking my showers at the public baths was being able to look at women. I found them beautiful, all of them. And that in itself was a rebuke to my mother who only understood bodies as sinful and ugly.

‘When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.’

I was a woman. I was a working-class woman. I was a woman who wanted to love women without guilt or ridicule. Those three things formed the basis of my politics, not the unions, or class war as understood by the male Left.

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

was a loner. I was self-invented. I didn’t believe in biology or biography. I believed in myself. Parents? What for? Except to hurt you.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it. Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

There was a person in me – a piece of me – however you want to describe it – so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace. That part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage a raid on the rest of the territory. My violent rages, my destructive behaviour, my own need to destroy love and trust, just as love and trust had been destroyed for me. My sexual recklessness – not liberation. The fact that I did not value myself. I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life. Didn’t that have a romance to it? Wasn’t that the creative spirit unbounded?

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that...

Remember the princess who kisses the frog – and yippee, there’s a prince? Well, it is necessary to embrace the slimy loathsome thing usually found in the well or in the pond, eating slugs. But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us. This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That’s the problem – the awful thing is you. It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. Mess this up, and you will go down with the creature. And – just to say – the creature loves a suicide. Death is part of the remit. I am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that I had to start talking – to the creature.

The love-work that I have to do now is to believe that life will be all right for me. I don’t have to be alone. I don’t have to fight for everything. I don’t have to fight everything. I don’t have to run away. I can stay because this is love that is offered, a sane steady stable love.

I am the kind of person who would rather walk than wait for a bus. The kind of person who will drive out of my way rather than sit in traffic. The kind of person who assumes that any problem is there for me to solve. I am not capable of queuing – I’d rather give up on whatever I have to queue for – and I won’t take no for an answer. What is ‘no’? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the ‘yes’.

I guess that over the last few years I have come home. I have always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I have worked hard at being the hero of my own life, but every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn’t know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.

‘The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.’

When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

I remember watching Toy Story 3 with my godchildren, and crying when the abandoned bear turned playroom tyrant sums up his survivor-philosophy: ‘No owner, no heartbreak.’ But I wanted to be claimed.

What I had to understand is that you can be a loner and want to be claimed. We’re back to the complexity of life that isn’t this thing or that thing – the boring old binary oppositions – it’s both, held in balance. So simple to write. So hard to do/be. And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn’t poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.