The Pursuit of Happiness

Would you rather be a happy simple-minded person or tortured genius?

This question was asked of me a few weeks ago by one of those cheery, spammy e-mail quizzes we all get and, despite the fact that my answer was immediate and resolute, I have been thinking about it ever since.

I would rather be a happy, simple-minded person. And yet ... if you had asked me this question fifteen years ago my answer would have been just as immediate and resolute. I would rather be a tortured genius.

And what has happened during the last fifteen years to change my mind is the real question that has continued to haunt me long after I deleted that seemingly innocuous little e-mail.

In my teenage years and early twenties, I vividly remember worrying that my uneventful middle class upbringing was insufficient preparation for a future I imagined as a famous and important writer. I was healthy. I had a strong and loving family. I was even—horrors!—popular in high school. Could I create great art if I had never been, as Jean-Paul Sartre would describe it, the other? Didn’t I need to suffer? Turns out the universe was happy to oblige whether I needed it or not.

In my mid-twenties, in the space of a year or so, my world started to fall apart. I had a cancer scare. My childhood home was rocked by turmoil and pain. The man upon whom I had depended for years abruptly cut me out of his life. My best friend died.

I moved into a one-room apartment in downtown Toronto. Determined to write the great Canadian novel, I waitressed, working the graveyard shift at a greasy spoon from eleven p.m. to seven a.m. five nights a week. I wrote furiously every afternoon. It was the most miserable and tortured time in my life.

I never published the novel I wrote that winter; I know now that it’s not even very good. I also know that, during that period of time, every ounce of positive energy I had was expended, not creating great art, but surviving.

I have never slept in a gutter in Paris. I have never been addicted to drugs or alcohol. I have never spent years wallowing in filth and misery. But I have suffered just enough to know that I don’t like it. I have felt enough pain to know that its constant presence is neither romantic, nor glamorous, and that a tortured genius at the end of the day is … well … tortured.