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

myself up into a frenzy of fear, however, would make both Jamie and me unhappy. (On the other hand, some believe that if you allow yourself to be unhappy, terrible things will happen—most likely cancer. This kind of thinking isn’t new. During the Great Plague of London in 1665, for example, people believed that staying cheerful would ward off infection.)
    Last, some people are unhappy because they won’t take the trouble to be happy. Happiness takes energy and discipline. It is easy to be heavy, etc. People who are stuck in an unhappy state are pitiable; surely they feel trapped, with no sense of having a choice in how they feel. Although their unhappiness is a drag on those around them—emotional contagion, unfortunately, operates more powerfully for negative emotions than for positive emotions—they suffer, too.
    Philosophers, scientists, saints, and charlatans all give instruction on how to be happy, but this doesn’t matter to a person who doesn’t want tobe happy. If you don’t believe you’re happy, you’re not. As Publilius Syrus observed, “No man is happy who does not think himself so.” If you think you’re happy, you are. That’s why Thérèse said, “I take care to appear happy and especially to be so. ”
     
    One of the key underlying purposes of this month’s resolutions and my entire happiness project was to be able to bear up courageously when the phone rang with bad news—as inevitably, it would.
    Well, bad news did come, right at the end of the month.
    My mother called. “Have you talked to Elizabeth?” she asked.
    “No, not for about a week,” I answered. “What’s up?”
    “Well, she has diabetes.”
    “Diabetes?”
    “Yes. Type 2, they think, but they’re not sure. It’s lucky they diagnosed her when they did—her blood sugar level was dangerously high.”
    “How did she figure it out? What happens now? Why did she get it?” Every random thing I knew about diabetes began zipping through my mind: the responsiveness of type 2 to changes in diet and behavior; the tensions that had arisen in the diabetes community between advocates for type 1 and type 2 over allocation of research money; memories from sixth grade, when I watched my friend injecting herself in her stomach with insulin. My mother told me what she knew. Then I called my sister to hear her tell the story over again.
    Over the next several weeks, the news kept changing. At first the doctors thought Elizabeth had type 2, even though she doesn’t fit the usual profile—she’s young, thin, fit. That diagnosis was a blow, but two things cushioned it. First, she’d been feeling lousy, and getting her blood sugar under control made her feel much better. Also, we were relieved that she didn’t have type 1, which requires daily insulin and can’t be alleviated by diet and exercise. Well—it turned out she did have type 1.
    When people are faced with serious setbacks, a psychological mechanism kicks in to help them see positive aspects in the situation, and I could feel myself starting to search for opportunities for “posttraumatic growth.” With various resolutions ringing in my ears, I tried to keep perspective and feel gratitude. “It’s so lucky they caught it when they did,” I told Elizabeth. “You’ll be eating well and exercising regularly. You’ll get this under control, you’ll get used to it, and you’ll do great.”
    Elizabeth deployed the downward-comparison strategy.
    “Yes,” she said. “And think about all the other things it could have been. The diagnosis could have been so much worse. Diabetes really is manageable.” What she didn’t say, and I didn’t say, was that sure, it could have been a lot worse—but it also could have been nothing at all.
    After college, my roommate was in a bad car accident, and I flew out to Hawaii to see her. She was wearing a halo brace with bolts drilled into her skull.
    “Do you feel lucky to be alive?” I asked.
    “Well, actually,” she said, “I feel like I really wish I hadn’t been in a damn car crash.”
    It’s not easy to stay focused on the positive. But I think that my resolutions did help me cope with this news. What if I’d been the one diagnosed with diabetes? I think they would have helped even more. A common eighteenth-century epitaph reads:
     
    Remember, friends, as you pass by,
    As you are now so once was I.
    As I am now, so you must be.
    Prepare yourself to follow me.
     
    A true happiness project sentiment. Now, I