What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

Five thousand little red hearts don’t mean much compared to that kind of faith in yourself. I want to taste that kind of faith. I want to feel it in my dirty, calloused hands. I want to know I was called to do this. I am building something big and gorgeous. I am at the center. It shouldn’t feel embarrassing to say so out loud. I am a symphony orchestra reaching a crescendo: formidable, chilling, irreplaceable.

Maybe that’s why the pastoral narrative requires such sharp teeth: If all lives include suffering, we’d like to suffer for valid reasons, and not because our supposedly ergonomic chairs make our backs ache, or the apps on our iPhones won’t load quickly enough.

The whole notion of pushing your physical limits—popularized by early Nike ads, Navy SEAL mythos, and Lance Armstrong’s cult of personality—has attained a religiosity that’s as passionate as it is pervasive. The “extreme” version of anything is now widely assumed to be an improvement on the original, rather than a perverse amplification of it. And as with most of sports culture, there is no gray area. You win or you lose. You leave it all on the floor—or you shamefully skulk off the floor with extra gas in your tank.

This version of romance peaks at the exact moment when you think, “Holy Christ, I really am going to melt right into this other person (who is a relative stranger)! It really is physically intoxicating and perfect! And it seems like we feel the exact same way about each other!”

Traditional romance is heady and exciting precisely because—and not in spite of the fact that—there are other, more insidious questions lingering at the edges of the frame: “Will I be enough? Will you be enough? Will we be enough together?”

But after many years of marriage, you don’t need any more proof. What you have instead—and what I would argue is the most deeply romantic thing of all—is this palpable, reassuring sense that it’s okay to be a human being. Because until you feel absolutely sure that you won’t eventually be abandoned, it’s maybe not 100 percent clear that any other human mortal can tolerate another human mortal.

That is the very definition of romance: not only not being made to feel crappy about things that are clearly out of your control, but being quietly cared for by someone who can shut up and do what needs to be done under duress. That is the definition of sexy, too. People think they want a cowboy, because cowboys are rugged and macho and they don’t whine. But almost anyone can ride a stallion across a beautiful prairie and then come home and eat a giant home-cooked steak without whining about it. Bravely entering into a wretched dysentery scene, though, will try the most stalwart and unflinching souls among us.

True romance, though, is more like the movie True Romance: Two deluded, lazy people face a bewildering sea of filth and blood and gore together, but they make it through it all somehow without losing their minds completely.

Our dumb culture tricks us into believing that romance is the suspense of not knowing whether someone loves you or not yet; the suspense of wanting to have sex but not being able to yet; the suspense of wanting all problems and puzzles to be solved by one person without knowing whether or not that person has any particular affinity for puzzles yet. We think romance is a mystery in which you add up clues that you will be loved. Romance must be carefully staged and art-directed, so everyone looks better than they usually do and seems sexier than they actually are, so the suspense can remain intact.

You, for one, really hope this lasts a whole hell of a lot longer. You savor the repetitive, deliciously mundane rhythms of survival, and you want to keep surviving. You want to muddle through the messiness of life together as long as you possibly can. That is the summit. Savor it. That is the very definition of romance.

This goes back to the core religion of the guru, of course: More than anything else, the modern guru denies the existence of external obstacles. Racism, systemic bias, income inequality—to acknowledge these would be to deny the power of the self. They are sidestepped in favor of handy modern conveniences, or the importance of casting off draining relationships, or the constant quest to say no to the countless opportunities rolling your way. What an indulgence it must be, to have your greatest obstacles be “sugar” or “anger” or “toxins.”

In other words, at this late date in human history, it would behoove most of us to think less like gurus and more like artists—deeply connected to ourselves and each other, painfully, beautifully aware of reality, and exquisitely alive to the moment—in order to build a new world outside of the toxic illusions of this one.

Imagine being told that your talent is a miracle, and you have just one job. You don’t have to be happy or successful or attractive or well-balanced as a human being. You don’t have to accrue wealth or maintain lots of friendships or seem impressive in any other way. You don’t have to tweet or share photos of your latest sheet music on Instagram or start a podcast about composing to increase your visibility and expand the size of your platform. You just have to do your one job to the best of your ability. Imagine being told that you have been given your talent by God, and you must honor God’s will by manifesting that talent in your creations.

Even once you accept that you’re just another regular mortal and not some supernatural force who deserves to live like a king—a message encoded in the background noise of our daily lives, rich, poor, or somewhere in the insecure in-between—it’s still hard not to wish for something more exciting than calm acceptance. It’s hard not to wish for the romance of movies, the soul-baring friendships of books, the egalitarian ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr., the miraculous talent of Mozart.

Many of us learn to construct a clear and precise vision of what we want, but we’re never taught how to enjoy what we actually have. There will always be more victories to strive for, more strangers to charm, more images to collect and pin to our vision boards. It’s hard to want what we have; it’s far easier to want everything in the world. So this is how we live today: by stuffing ourselves to the gills, yet somehow it only makes us more anxious, more confused, and more hungry. We are hurtling forward—frantic, dissatisfied, and perpetually lost.

There’s a scene in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot in which our protagonist, Selin, who is a student at Harvard, goes to see a therapist. After Selin explains that she feels alienated from her fellow students, her teachers, and herself, her therapist replies, “I’m interested in your comment that most people are ‘so awful.’ What makes most people awful?” Selin tells him that most people, the second they meet you, are sizing you up as competition for the same resources. “It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify the dispensable people—people they could get rid of.” “Do you see yourself as one of the dispensable people?” the therapist asks. Selin replies, “The point is, I don’t want to get involved in that question, and it’s all most people want to talk about.” She explains that not many people seem interested in “what you’re like.” They just want to figure out what you’re worth. Instead of recognizing that what Selin wants from the world is a divine and magical kind of connection between disparate souls, the therapist reveals himself to be precisely the kind of sorter Selin has described. He assumes that she is mostly consumed by a “fear of competition and a fear of rejection by [her] peers.” She is focused on success and fears failure, and she’s suffering from the low self-esteem common to all of the ultra-competitive students at Harvard. “You rat...

It’s not surprising that in a culture dominated by such messages, many people believe that humility will only lead to being crushed under the wheels of capitalism or subsumed by some malevolent force that abhors weakness. Our anxious age erodes our ability to be open and show our hearts to each other. It severs our ability to connect to the purity and magic that we carry around inside us already, without anything to buy, without anything new to become, without any way to conquer and win the shiny luxurious lives we’re told we deserve. So instead of passionately embracing the things we love the most, and in so doing reveal our fragility and self-hatred and sweetness and darkness and fear and everything that makes us whole, we present a fractured, tough, protected self to the world. Our shiny robot soldiers do battle with other shiny robot soldiers, each side calling the other side “terrible,” because in a world that can’t see poetry or recognize the divinity of each living soul, fragility curdles into macho toughness and soulless rage. All nuance is lost in a fearful rush to turn every passing thought or idea or belief into dogma.

We have to believe each and every day, in spite of a steady onslaught of setbacks and discouragement. We have to believe in our gifts. We have to believe in our peculiarities and our flaws. We have to believe in our capacity to love. We have to believe that what we do and how we live matters, like a once-in-four-decades phenomenon, like a miracle.

It is necessary to make an imaginative effort which runs contrary to the whole contemporary trend of the art world: it is necessary to see works of art freed from all the mystique which is attached to them as property objects. It then becomes possible to see them as testimony to the process of their own making instead of as products; to see them in terms of action instead of finished achievement. The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?

Here is how you will start: You will recognize that you are not headed for some imaginary finish line, some state of “best”ness that will finally bring you peace. You will see that you are as much of a miracle as Mozart was. You will remember that bit of advice lurking inside one of Shirley Jackson’s dark novels: “Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.” You will feel this and know it in your heart and pass this feeling along to the people around you. You will breathe in this moment—this imperfect, uncertain, not-quite-right, heavenly moment. You will say to yourself, “It is enough.” And it will be.