The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

about this prayer on my blog, and several readers who identified themselves as “joyous ones” responded.
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    T his entry almost made me cry—as one of the joyful ones, I agree wholeheartedly that it can be draining too, and it takes so little to show your appreciation.
     
    I’m one of those people who wakes up happy every day—not because nothing ever goes wrong in my life—because I choose to be happy. Literally. For reasons I don’t fully understand, people seem ticked off that I’m in a good mood. But, they want to draw on that energy, too. It is exhausting sometimes.
     
    Gretchen—I am also a joyous one. I choose to be. I choose it every day. I have recently gone through a traumatic breakup because my boyfriend SO couldn’t stop blasting my joy. And yet also unrelentingly drawing upon it like a drowning person in a sea. I felt as if I was being pulled under more every day. I had to go or I wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore. I didn’t know anyone understood.
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    These comments reminded me that the joy of the joyous ones wasn’t inexhaustible or unconquerable. I started to make a real effort to use my good cheer to support the joyous ones I knew.
    To keep my resolution to “Give positive reviews,” I resolved to employ the intensive approach I’d used during the Week of Extreme Nice and the Month of Novel Writing. Maybe a week of playing Pollyanna would help accelerate my move toward the positive. In Eleanor Porter’s enormously successful 1913 novel, Pollyanna, Pollyanna plays the “glad game”: whatever happens to her, she finds a reason to be glad about it. My own game, “Pollyanna Week,” would be a solid week of no negative comments. I knew I should “Act the way I want to feel,” and if I wanted to feel enthusiastic, warm, and accepting, I wasn’t going to get there by constantly making sniping comments.
    I woke up the first morning, deep in thought about Pollyanna Week, and by 7:00 A.M ., I’d already broken it. Practically the first thing I said to Jamie was to chide him: “You never answer my e-mails, and you didn’t answer my e-mail yesterday, so I couldn’t get any of those scheduling issues settled. Do we need a babysitter for Thursday night or not?”
    The next day, I did the same thing. We were all sitting around beforeschool when Eleanor started pointing to her mouth, in what we thought was a cute way, until she started making gagging noises.
    “Quick, get a towel, she’s going to throw up!” I yelled.
    Eliza darted into the kitchen, but she still hadn’t emerged when Eleanor began heaving half-digested milk all over herself, me, and the furniture.
    “Jamie, go get a towel!” He’d been sitting, mesmerized by the sight. By the time they both rushed back from the kitchen with dish towels, Eleanor had finished throwing up, and she and I were wallowing in a big, yucky mess.
    “Folks, that was not the fastest action we could’ve had,” I scolded. “We could’ve saved a lot of trouble if you’d been faster with those towels.” Why did I throw out a negative comment? It added to the general loss of morale without making any useful point.
    One lesson that Pollyanna Week taught me was that I could usually make my point, even if it was critical, in a positive way. For example, I broke Pollyanna Week during a game of “Finders, Keepers” with Eliza. The point of Finders, Keepers is to accumulate the most tiles.
    “Can I trade my baseball cap tile for your butterfly tile?” Eliza asked after one round.
    “Okay.”
    We played another round.
    “Can I trade my globe for your flower?”
    “Okay.”
    We played another round.
    “Can I trade my football for your ice cream sundae?”
    I’d been getting increasingly annoyed. “Eliza, it’s tiresome when you keep trading tiles,” I told her. “Just keep what you get, and you can trade them at the end. ‘You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.’”
    “All right,” she said cheerfully.
    Only later did I realize that I could have phrased my request without criticism: “The game is more fun when we keep it moving fast. Can we trade at the end?”
    That night I did a better job, largely because I was so tired that I went to bed at nine. Being asleep is a great way to avoid being critical. But when I said to Jamie, “I’m so exhausted that I’m going to bed now,” was that a complaint or a statement of fact? It counted as a complaint. I should’ve found a positive way to phrase it: “Going to