What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

Somehow, the little things—the eavesdropped-on conversations, the tense family dynamics—take on a special kind of heaviness when you’re visiting Disneyland. As Joseph Conrad put it in Heart of Darkness, “They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.” The semi-hypnotic state of helplessness you enter is central to the experience of Disney. All of your membranes become porous; the sadness can enter your bloodstream directly. You are removed from all familiar signifiers, and it makes you all the more vulnerable. You are trying to be a good parent, but there you are, defenseless, in a vast sea of human beings, huddled in their desperate gaggles, squabbling, regretful, sweating profusely, scarfing Mickey Mouse–shaped beignets and cups of frozen lemonade and hot dogs bathed in oily chili, all of them simultaneously beating back that inevitable feeling of melancholy that comes from being at The Happiest Place on Earth, and discovering that they’re deeply, inescapably unhappy.