The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (12 page)

“I feel like I’m right back at the time of my life when I’m insecure and I wish I could be more mature and not care what others are doing or thinking. Take a hiking trip or just go off and do my own thing. But then I wish someone would come with me and there I am, right back at the planning again: Let’s all go on a hiking trip! I feel like I am so predictable and I’m sick of myself. I’d leave me out too.”

Danielle is quite embarrassed by this little “secret” of hers. She hasn’t told anyone but her fiancé about it because she thinks it makes her seem so pathetic and immature. “It’s ridiculous, I know, but every single time one of my friends starts to get chummy with another person that I introduced them to, I get crazy jealous.”

Catherine says that feeling jealous when friends become close is completely normal—to a point—but that Danielle is hypersensitive about this because of her sister dynamic, which to this day continues to plague her relationships with other women. When she was growing up as the middle sister, it hurt her that her older and younger sisters seemed closer, since it felt logical to her that she should be the glue, being the middle child in age. But her sisters shared sports and a love of all things competitive (even though they were four years apart in age, they might as well have been twins, and she even called them “the ponytail twins”) and she was more the cheerleader type. It was easy for them to bond over soccer and tennis and their favorite football players on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but whenever she tried to do anything to get between them, even just sitting on the couch during a TV show, they would scoff at her hairdo or her makeup or her short skirt and make fun of her to the point that she had to leave the room in order not to cry. So now her sisters are grown up and still close as can be and she feels left out. Her sensitivity to being pushed aside is like an old wound that is easy to bruise or reopen.

When Danielle assigns these roles to her friends she is displacing her disappointment about not being an integrated sister in the sibling lineup onto her friends. Then she gives up too easily, as if she already is resigned to an outcome where she is not included.

Catherine says that she participates in the way things play out, since in some way she is perpetuating this dynamic. She basically gives up and walks away, since she expects that eventually she’ll feel bad, so on some level she accelerates the process. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whether Danielle is in the basement (memories of the ponytail twins) or the family room (where the present day means it’s still hard to be with them) or the living room (where she sabotages herself by projecting this dynamic onto her female friends), she has to recognize the pattern and decide to break it. The process is a form of acting out, since if she expressed herself and simply explained that she was sensitive to this issue, her friends might make sure to be sensitive to her. From their perspective, they likely don’t even notice it’s happening. They can’t read her mind, so she has to learn to communicate her feelings openly and not be scared of getting hurt.

Her pearl is to be direct, not to act out by checking out: Be honest with yourself and those around you in order to be a better friend, to yourself and others.

Joelle has always had tons of friends. “Growing up, my friends were everything to me. And when my husband and I moved to a new town, it was very important to us that we made new, good friends, and we did. Over the past fifteen years in Rochester, we have celebrated many birth
days and important events, and we always found time on weekends to have brunch or get families together. It was great.”

Lately, however, Joelle has been feeling disenchanted with her friends. “It’s like they are still talking about the same stuff. Last week at a barbecue, everyone started talking about their burial plans. I was horrified. I wanted to run from the room and find new friends! I wanted to throw the munchies on the floor and scream, What is wrong with you people? Aren’t you bored with yourselves?” That is when Joelle knew she had reached a critical moment in her life.

Though Vin, her husband, wasn’t involved in the funeral plot conversation, he agrees with Joelle that their friends are becoming bores. “Vin and I recently did some really interesting volunteer work overseas and I feel invigorated,” Joelle says. “It’s like I have a renewed sense of purpose. But our friends don’t really seem too interested in that. Sure they came over for dinner and a slide show, but then it was forgotten, and we went back to the usual conversations. Which are getting more and more dreadful.”

The problem is that Joelle is not feeling as old as her friends feel. She can look in the mirror and figure out that she’s not aging as fast as they are, which is a good thing, but it’s causing tension. She is exhibiting some narcissistic traits here, since she thinks:
You all may be dying but I am better than you because I am refusing to age.
She believes her way is the right way, and while delaying the aging process is fine, she doesn’t need to hate her friends for the fact that they are acknowledging aging, even embracing the phase of life they are entering.

Joelle is also doing what is called “displacement,” which is redirecting feelings about one thing (her aging, the fact that her parents recently died, her own mortality) onto another (her friends and their preoccupation with topics related to growing older and even death). Joelle can try to stay young forever, but she cannot force these feelings onto her friends or resent them for how they are acting.

She should also realize that her friends think she is in denial, that not to plan for the inevitability of death or aging is foolish. It’s admirable that Joelle feels vital and healthy and wants to stay that way by surrounding her
self with young and active people. “I know I’m getting older,” Joelle says, “but do I have to act like an old lady before I am one?”

She wants to grow and evolve, but to toss over her old pals would be a mistake. The solution for her is to find new friends who are in sync with this phase of her life. She can still appreciate the shared history she has with her old friends while she has exciting adventures with her new ones.

Here’s her key process for cleaning up the living room: It’s not either/or; it’s both/and. Joelle can have her old friends and her new ones, although she probably can’t expect them to meld. These two groups represent parts of her life—her future (new pals) and her past (old pals)—and she can appreciate the time she spends with each, in the present. The pearl: Conflict is okay. In this case, that means you can have different friends for different aspects of your life.

Diane has it all: a great husband, a successful sports marketing firm, two teenage kids, and a great life. She’s active, pretty, slender, and a fun, upbeat woman. But after a glass or two of wine she becomes flirtatious, though she would never do anything unfaithful or cross the line. It’s as if in these moments, she needs more attention, especially from the men in the room. At parties, this often takes the form of flirting with Nick, the husband of one of her old friends, Kathy. Diane and Nick knew each other in college and have
always had a little—but unspoken—thing for each other. However, the little spark between Diane and Nick still seems to be there, and it bothers Diane, because when the four of them are together she and Nick talk more than they should, and she doesn’t feel like this is nice to either her own husband or her friend Kathy, who always pretends not to notice.

“I know that he thinks I’m fun, and he makes me feel really good about myself, and I think he’s a great guy, but at the end of the night I’m glad to be going home with Tom. I know I made a good decision in marrying him. So why do I spend the entire evening soliciting Nick’s attention and getting him to laugh at my jokes? It’s kind of embarrassing. I really hate myself, feel guilty, and vow never to do it again. And then I
do
.”

Catherine says Diane is struggling with self-esteem issues and probably isn’t interested in Nick as much as she is in how his attention makes her feel: young, pretty, smart, funny, etc. Diane isn’t so much competing with Kathy or jealous of her marriage, but looking for male attention where she can feel safe getting it.

Diane needs positive affirmation from outside her marriage because she is feeling bad about herself—about aging (especially her looks) and what she offers the world. She appears to have it all, but from where she sits her star is waning and she needs to know she’s still “got it.” This is an expression of narcissism, since it’s a form of overinvolvement with the self, even though she is actually lapping up the attention of someone else. It’s a reflected admiration, because her own self-love is not enough and she needs to feel it from everyone around her.

Catherine reminds us that there is such a thing as healthy narcissism. We all need to love ourselves; it’s essential and self-preserving. But it can cross over into a pattern that can damage our relationships and hurt us. Tom tells Diane she is pretty and smart and winning, and yet she needs to seek the same feedback elsewhere, as if his compliments are not enough. Diane sees Tom as an extension of herself, and since she doesn’t always believe her own pings, she doesn’t trust his either.

For Diane, the combination of self-love (thinking she’s attractive) is combined with self-loathing (feeling old). Whether you feel overly posi
tive or overly negative about yourself can be a problem. Any kind of overinvolvement in the self is considered unhealthy narcissism. Thinking you are hot stuff or thinking you are a piece of dog doo is equally narcissistic, Catherine explains. So when Diane berates herself the next morning for bad behavior, this extreme mood swing becomes part of what’s causing her trouble. She needs to understand that rather than feel overly special or overly terrible, she can just be herself.

Diane has to move to another room, since she is spending too much time in the bathroom, scrutinizing herself in the mirror. Her bathroom is tied too closely to the rest of her house, in particular her living room. She needs to find satisfaction and develop other parts of her personality.

Diane is defining herself as others see her, rather than defining herself from the inside out. The solution is to spend more time in what we call the Tenth Room, where she can organize her value system and stop allowing the pings of others to define her. To do this she has to value herself in a healthy and productive way. First, she must find her authentic inner self and then develop that person. She has to learn to believe she is attractive without anyone telling her. If she can depend on her own feedback without needing it from others, then she can be the best version of herself, not someone seeking or needing that self reflected back at her from others.

Catherine says narcissists often get into patterns called idealization/devaluation, where they flip-flop between polar opposite emotions about themselves so that they either love themselves or hate themselves. One minute they think they’re super great, or superior to others, and the next they are down on themselves to the same extreme. The truth is, all of us are a mix of positive and negative traits and behaviors; all relationships contain good and bad behavior, and everything in between. You can like yourself and also accept that you have flaws and, like everyone else, you make mistakes.

For the narcissist, the goal is to recognize that you have both likeable traits and those you have to learn to live with. The key is to learn to love and accept yourself, warts and all. Only then can you truly be open to the lives of others. The more you connect with others, the happier you will be. Get outside your own head, move away from the mirror and back to
the living room, where all the interesting people are waiting to get to know the real you.

So the final thought for the living room is that it’s about connecting and evolving and listening, not competing. The expression “keeping up with the Joneses” was based on Edith Wharton’s father’s family, who were wealthy and social but not necessarily happy, as her stories illustrate. It’s an expression that is still relevant now, all these decades later, because it is human nature to compare ourselves to others and see how we measure up. Whenever I wish I had the affluence I see around me, I remind myself that I have made my own choices and I am happy with my life, my kids, husband, and job. At the end of the day I wouldn’t trade places with anyone, even those with “more.” The living room is not a place to harbor envy, or measure yourself against your friends, or “give” too much of yourself. It’s a place to enjoy the company of others, offer support, empathy, and friendship, and accept the same in return.

You Earn Your Paycheck…and Your Stress

W
elcome to your office, where you handle issues related to
whatever it is you define as your work, whether it’s in the home or at a place of business. The emotional office in your house is where worries about money and career and purpose all need to be dealt with. It’s where you work on your “work,” but what you do there is hopefully personally rewarding.

Stress Is Our Perpetual State of Being

Most women feel they are “crazy busy” all the time but always want to do more. The minute I get an open slot in my jam-packed schedule I add a project, whether it’s a redesign at the magazine, a new workout schedule, or co-writing this book. It sounds crazy, but I love having too much to do and too little time to do it all. What would I give up? Not my family, not my job, and not my athletic pursuits. I run or bike or swim in the morning so that I can focus for the rest of the day without the itchy feeling of wanting to get up and walk around. That attitude helps me feel like I am getting the most out of myself, and my life, but it can sometimes backfire, like when I get down on myself. That’s when I have to fight off the stress of feeling like I could always do everything better.

Most of us say we either have too much to do, or that too little of what we do—other than our family duties—has meaning. Women want to make an impact. They also try to balance their needs and the needs of others. Over and over Catherine and I hear women say, “I can’t say no”
because they don’t want to disappoint anyone. They have a boss, a husband, kids, parents, and friends who all want a piece of them. The question is, how can you have it all—the family and the job, the time for yourself, and the time for others—and not feel like you are shortchanging yourself in any of those parts of your life?

I Do It All…Just a Lot Less Perfectly Than I’d Like

When someone tells me, “I don’t know how you do it!” it’s like a red cape to a bull. I want to ask right back, “What do you mean? Are you saying that I can’t possibly do a good job on so many things at once?” The implication that I must be shirking some of my responsibilities as a mother, wife, or working person is embedded in the remark. I know it’s often said in admiration, but part of me hears it as a judgment against the working mom, and so I try to disarm the situation by saying, “It’s easy—I just do it all badly.” Or, if it’s about parenting, I’ll shoot back, “My children were raised by wolves.” Or the dog. Or simply that they raised themselves.

I figure that if I can laugh at myself, my inquisitor will laugh too. But then I ask myself,
Is that how I
really
feel? Why
am
I doing so much?
And the truth is, I sometimes think I could be there more for my daughter, or for my husband, who once again has to pick up our dinner on his way home from work. When I was feeling overwhelmed like that, I used to reach for a glass of wine to chill out and douse the sparks of stress in my brain. Now I go for a swim or a run. It’s a healthier way to cope with stress, and I often come upon a solution while plowing through the repetitive motions of swimming or jogging that puts my brain on “dimmer” and allows creativity to flow.

Catherine says another key is to tell yourself you are doing your best today, and to forgive yourself for some of the things you don’t accomplish. You must be willing to believe that “good enough” is truly good enough.

Whatever your daily responsibilities, the universal emotion seems to be stress about not doing it all well enough. To reduce your feelings of inadequacy about this, you need to figure out when you’re in your emotional
office, and when you’re in another room, feeling guilty, for example, about missing your child’s violin recital or lacrosse game.

“The Bad Compromise” and Other Conflicts

The bad compromise
is a phrase I coined several years ago when my then ten-year-old son, Julian, was competing in the sprints at his school’s “field day” and was so nervous about wanting to do well he was ill the night before. But I was the newly minted editor of a major magazine and didn’t want to let either work or family down that morning. It was a disaster in the making.

I went downtown for a morning meeting and planned to get back uptown to the park in time for the races at 11 a.m. But things at work ran late, and I was hyperventilating by the time I jumped in a cab and then ran shoeless across the baseball fields to get to where the boys were racing. As I arrived, I realized I was too late. A well-meaning mother came up and said, “Did you see him? He was great. He won and was so happy.” I almost burst into tears.

My son galloped over with his ribbon and said, “Mom, did you see me?” I said, “Yes, honey, you were amazing! I am so proud of you.” The rest of the day was a blur for me because of the guilt I felt over missing the only thirty seconds that mattered to Julian, and the lie I had told him. By the time I got back to work I had a name for this scenario: the bad compromise. It means, basically, that by trying to be too many places at once, everyone gets short shrift, most of all me. I had rushed through my morning meeting, I’d missed the race regardless, and I’d told my son a rare lie. It was a losing proposition all around. I was trying to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one.

It was also a moment of reckoning. I vowed never to let this kind of stupidity happen again. Now when I have a conflict like that, when I know I have to take a direct hit, I make the call early, and plan for it. I tell my team at work, “I have to be at Josie’s track meet and will make up the time before and after,” and sometimes I tell Josie, “I wish I could be at every one
of your games, but I can’t, so let’s figure out which ones mean the most to you and I will block out the time for you and definitely be there.” Then I put “Lucy out” on my work schedule so that my top directors can plan around this block of time (I rarely feel guilty since I read for hours late at night to make up for the work time I have to miss, so it all evens out by the end of the day).

I also recognize how lucky I am to have a job that is more flexible than most. Once upon a time I worked at a newspaper where I was a cog in a huge wheel and had to work the hours that my bosses dictated, no matter what was happening in my personal life. I would finish my story for the paper and then have to sit there and watch the copy editor do other work, and when he finally read my story it was only important that I stay so he could ask me a question every now and then. I literally had to watch him eat, take personal calls, and get around to my story whenever he felt like it, so I couldn’t leave even though all I was doing was sitting and waiting. The hours ticked by. The next time I had a newspaper job was years later, in the days of cell phones, and I also had a toddler and another baby on the way. I told the copy editor (systems rarely change) that he could call me and I was going home to have dinner with my child. He balked.
If I have to stay, you have to stay,
was his attitude. It felt like all I was doing was putting in “face time.” It became another catchphrase for me.

I now don’t believe in face time. It’s more like “in your face” time to me, since it’s hostile and not necessary. Now I run a magazine of mostly women and I tell them: Your work has to be excellent and your personal commitments—kids, doctors’ appointments, or whatever takes you away from the office in the day—can’t hold up the meetings and work of the monthly magazine we produce. So we juggle our lives around big meetings and deadlines and help one another when someone has a babysitter who doesn’t show, or a parent who gets sick, or any other unanticipated event. Beyond that, we all have to live and work and figure it out.

I am immensely proud of the environment I have created at my office since it doesn’t involve the bad compromise (unless absolutely necessary)
or require face time, and does produce an award-winning product. In my personal life, my kids know I love to work and will always have a job of some kind and they are cool with that. Even if it involves missing some of their games.

I now have a little code with my daughter, which is half-funny, half-serious: I ask her, “Is this going to be a couch moment later?” And she says, “No.” And then I ask, “Is this going to make the top ten?” And she says, “Not even top hundred.” She also knows that if she really needs me I will drop everything and get home ASAP. She knows this is the case, so she doesn’t ask often.

I have always had a “divided” life in terms of work and kids and tell my team, “I always take the call” from my kids, which means sometimes home encroaches on work. But it’s a two-way street, and the boundaries aren’t perfect, since many nights I have to work at home after dinner. Still, as long as I don’t make the bad compromises, it all works out in my emotional office. My pearl here is that you have to be authentic and not worry about what others think (the pinging of the office and the home). For this situation, I also use this pearl: It’s not either/or…it’s both/and. It’s okay to have some conflict, as long as you learn from it, or it leads you to make better decisions in the future.

That’s Why They Call It Work

Not everyone has the luxury of loving their job, but you can love the things it affords you. The point is to know why you work. Often a paycheck is enough.

The ideal is to get paid for something we like to do or that is rewarding. If you can’t combine those two things, though, that’s fine. Just be clear that the money supports what you love in your other rooms. Rarely do you get to mix passion, purpose, and paycheck, but when you do, it’s magic.

This “magical” state, when you are so absorbed in what you’re doing that you feel a natural high, is also known as “flow,” a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi back in the 1960s to describe anything—an activity or productive mental state—that you can lose yourself in. When you feel flow
you are so enrapt in the moment that you lose track of time and focus comes easily. It doesn’t feel like work; it is effortless. Some athletes and musicians experience flow—they can be so engrossed in what they are doing that they are almost in a trance. Every one of us is capable of feeling it too.

In our experience, feeling flow at work means that what you are doing can be a source of great happiness, but also stress when the feeling doesn’t come and you can’t find that “sweet spot.” If you are a flow seeker, the stakes get higher, because as you attain that feeling of focus and satisfaction, you add on more challenges to keep engaged. If you’re a driven person, your job will likely be both the most rewarding and the most depleting part of your life, depending on whether you’re having a good day—feeling flow—or a bad one.

It’s not just the extreme personalities who find flow; Catherine has it while sitting in a chair, listening to women talk. “I lose myself in my work. I find it totally engrossing,” she says. “It’s a privilege to help women feel well, and get paid for it. That’s where I experience flow.”

Whatever we choose to do with our day, and whatever we call “work,” how we feel about it is what matters. For some women, the ultimate luxury is being a stay-at-home mom, and for others that’s the ultimate sacrifice. Either way, we all agree that it counts as “work.”

The stay-at-home mother may not get a paycheck, but her work duties (cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, child care, tutoring, etc.), if paid for in the “real world,” would be worth about $125,000 a year. The question really isn’t whether she is valued—she should be, by her loved ones, whether they express it or not! The more important question: Is
she
happy and feeling purposeful in her day-to-day duties, as well as in her big picture? Catherine and I support any choice a woman makes, as long as she feels it was her choice, and that her day has purpose. That’s true for the stay-at-home mother, the lawyer, the toll collector, the shrink, and the magazine editor. But if you are not feeling a sense of self-worth or meaningfulness, then we want you to figure out what is going on and then how to move on and find the purpose you lack.

In this economy you won’t always have a choice about what you do or how you spend your day, but you always have a choice in how you
feel
about it.

Kristi is a California girl who moved to New York straight out of college to follow her dream of being a magazine writer and editor. It’s a tough way to make a living—journalism may look glamorous as it’s portrayed in
Ugly Betty
and
The Devil Wears Prada
, but the reality is hard work, long hours, and fierce competition for a dwindling number of jobs with thousands of smart, talented, and driven women. Because of the long hours she has to put in, Kristi can’t get home as often as she’d like.

“I missed my sister’s engagement party, and when I did come back for her wedding, I got a lot of grief from my friends. I feel like they’re judging me. Most of them will marry their boyfriend from high school and never leave the neighborhood, and live the same boring lives their mothers live. I can’t do that.”

Kristi knows she has made the right choice but feels conflicted when her mother sends her a sweet e-mail describing the family’s Sunday ritual of a bike ride along the Pacific at sunset. That makes Kristi want to cry because she feels she is missing out on the mundane things that make their family life so special.

Making her feel even worse about being so far from her family is the fact that her father has been very sick. If he dies while she is in New York she will never forgive herself for missing out on spending more time with him. She can’t figure out how to be a successful journalist and a good daughter.

Kristi says, “I’m glad I’m living my dreams and trying to become more independent. I feel like if I stayed home it would be more of the same, and
I wanted a change. I have nothing against the choices my friends made but I know I did the right thing by leaving.” Her path took her far away from home and her comfort zone, and now she feels alien when she returns. Yet her friends don’t understand how she could live so far away, and they’re happy staying close.