Who Would I Be If I Was Happy?

Last year, the rapper NF (Nathan Feuerstein) released a song that expresses something profound about our cultural moment.

“Happy” describes a life marked by mental health struggles, stresses and obsessions, sins and selfish patterns. NF describes his desire for God and a longing for happiness, while giving voice to his fear that finding happiness would mean losing himself. Who would he be without his pain? The refrain of “Happy” is an admission:

In the second verse, NF acknowledges his bouts of depression (“baggage,” “demons,” “traumas”) and interpersonal conflict (“hurtful words,” “bridges burned,” “insecurities”)—challenges that have marked his life so long he can’t imagine himself apart from these problems. He admits he’s “a lonely soul” in need of “a hand to hold,” but he hesitates to ask for healing because, if the pain were gone and his issues resolved, who would he be?

Generational Identity Crisis

“The truth is, I need help, but I just can’t imagine who I’d be if I was happy.” That’s a line as powerful as it is profound, especially in this cultural moment.

We live in a time of self-creation. The traditional markers of identity that once came from outside ourselves—from our family or friends or community or past—are viewed as subpar, even repressive. We’re supposed to chart our own course, to look deep inside to discover our desires and define ourselves as we determine.

This way of life sounds exhilarating at first, but the result is fragility. What happens when we adopt the therapeutic assumptions of our age, when we look into our hearts and find only failures and frailty? Many of us begin to define ourselves by our maladies, to base our identities in suffering.

There’s truth here, of course. All of us are marked by suffering and struggle. We cannot deny we’re influenced by life’s circumstances and shaped by personal sorrow. We’re human beings, not robots. We’re not invulnerable to the vicissitudes of life.

But NF’s confession captures the tendency of young people to self-diagnose, to base their identities in their issues, whatever they may be. Once you make this turn, you feel a visceral reaction to the hope of healing. You’re both attracted and repelled by the thought. You can get to a point where you so strongly identify with your pain and struggle that the prospect of healing feels like a threat to your identity. Overcoming the suffering would mean losing yourself.

There’s a tinge of this sadness in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work. We encounter the laudable desire to see the eradication of anti-black racism coming into conflict with the chilling thought that if all traces of racial injustice were to disappear, something integral to the black experience—endurance through suffering—would be lost. A key component of black identity would vanish. Give me justice, Lord, just not yet!

Would Happiness Erase Me?

Sociologists and commentators have recognized this conundrum more broadly. Many young people are increasingly drawn to establishing and expressing their identities through their psychological maladies.

The problem, of course, is that the more we identify ourselves by our pain, our past, or our present struggles—putting these at the center of who we are, rather than as one of many contributing factors to our personalities—the more we risk missing the path to happiness. Or worse, we resist the road to happiness out of fear that “being happy” would mean no longer “being me.”

These are the questions that arise: If my attempts to address my anxiety reduce my drive and ambition, then what does that mean for who I am? Am I the same person if, through counseling, I become emotionally healthy? Am I only a product of the pain in my past? Am I forever marked by the sin or evil that has been done to me? If I were to be healed, would I still be me? If I were to forgive, would I lose myself? Who am I, if not a tortured soul? Would happiness erase me?

Do You Want to Be Healed?

NF’s song reminds me of Jesus’s encounter with the paralyzed man on the steps near the pool of Bethesda (John 5). Here was a man defined by paralysis and the dashing of dreams. Every time the waters were stirred, he watched, helplessly, as others made their way to the source of healing. Jesus asked him point blank: “Do you want to be healed?” The man doesn’t say yes or no. He sinks back into the sad situation that defines him.

Several of the characters in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce face this quandary. There’s the woman so wrapped up in her desire to control others that she cannot imagine eternal happiness that excludes her machinations. There’s the man so defeated by his lusts that he can’t countenance the idea of the lizard on his shoulder being put to death, out of fear he’d die with it. There’s the lady so given to grumbling that she fades into oblivion until she’s nothing more than a grumble herself.

NF’s song speaks to the tension felt by many in our generation—the “be true to yourself” mentality steeped in therapeutic assumptions. Perhaps we, as God’s people, should back up one step from assuming everyone wants happiness. We should instead look beyond the crippling self-consciousness that keeps a person enchained and ask the question Jesus asks: “Do you want to be healed?”

The call to faith is to invite people into the healing waters where a new self awaits.

There’s no way around it: Loss is inevitable. To find yourself, you must lose yourself. To live, you must die.

As the people of God, we can sympathize with the frightful feeling that comes with taking this step of faith, but we can’t eliminate the adventure. What we can do is beckon people from the other side, urging them to cross the line and receive a new identity. We can model the joy that comes after we renounce the breadcrumbs of an identity based primarily in sorrow and rejoice at the feast God spreads on the table of redemption.

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