On Being Happy for Other People
Of all the things I could cry about seven weeks after brain surgery, the only subject that I shed a tear over was attending my friend’s wedding.
“It would be better if I weren’t a bridesmaid,” I told my mom, my hair still wrapped in a towel after my first post-surgical shower. “If all of those people weren’t looking at me.”
That evening, my mom and I got into bathing suits so she could wash my hair. As she turned on the water, she told me to look up. I thought it was to keep the soap out of my eyes. It wasn’t. It was to keep me from watching the shower floor fill up with blood like a deleted frame out of Psycho.
“They won’t be looking at you; they’ll be looking at the bride,” she said.
“I know, but for the aisle part.”
I thought about superficial things: the thinning hair around my sutra line, my bald spots, how pale and ashen I would look, not only post-surgery but in the depths of a sunless January.
And then I thought about not-so-superficial things, like having a stroke or a seizure and not having anyone (read: my mom) there to help me. But more than anything else, one worry persisted, no matter how hard I tried to bury it: how bitter I felt.
Bitter that everyone else, it seemed, got to develop normally. That they got to go to high school and college, get jobs, get married, and have kids, proceeding square by square on the game board we call Life, watching as they lapped me, as I remained the same: stuck at the starting line.
In Dr. Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart, she writes about interviewing emotions researcher Dr. Marc Brackett for the Unlocking Us podcast. Right before the show, Dr. Brown asked him if resentment was part of the anger family.
“No,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Resentment is part of envy.”
“Oh, holy shit,” she said.
Because it’s not, I’m mad at you for getting married. It’s that I’m scared, because I don’t think I ever will. And I want to be.
Despite its reputation, I don’t think envy is inherently negative. Because all envy does is show you what you want most.
At the beginning of Snow White, Queen Grimhilde, also known as the “Evil Queen,” asks the magic mirror, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” And the mirror tells the Evil Queen that she’s no longer the fairest of them all; Snow White is.
Although this would completely eradicate the plot, I do wonder what would happen if the Evil Queen didn’t feel the need to take out Snow White. What would it be like for the Evil Queen to admit to herself: It doesn’t hurt because Snow White is the fairest of them all. It hurts because I once was. And I miss it.
The next day, I had an idea. In college, I interned for Erin Fetherston, a designer and CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist known for a signature look: a braided headband.
“The braid could go across my scar,” I told my mom.
I went to a hair salon in midtown Manhattan that sent me to Helena Collections Wigs, a well-known shop near Koreatown that offered a wide variety of synthetic and human hairpieces and extensions. There, an Asian woman with kind eyes took one strand of hair after another, looking for a color match.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“Good,” I said, inspecting the match. So good, in fact, I couldn’t tell the difference between their hair and my hair. “Very good.”
The day of the wedding—armed with my fake braid and a face full of professionally applied makeup—I could pass. As long as you didn’t actually talk to me (I was still aphasic), I could pass for healthy. Walking down that aisle, I could pass for normal.
And in that moment, watching my friend tear up as she and her husband read their vows, I could be happy for them, while still wanting that for myself, because my heart was then—and continues to be—big enough to hold both: big enough to hold the joy and the bitterness and the resentment and the sadness and the grief and the hope, and circle back to joy once again. Because the heart is big enough to hold all of it.
