Marcia Yudkin is the author of 17 nonfiction books, as well as essays in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue, and NPR. Marcia advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com/). She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).

88.6

Week after week, essays in my writing workshop depict torment, anguish, and bruises. 

The aftermath of a bullied 11-year-old’s suicide. A girl beaten by parents trying to purge her of demons.  A man raging at the brother who brought his boyfriend to Thanksgiving dinner. A mother soothing her young son’s genetic-disease lesions.

Do I belong in this class, in this world? I wonder.

In the movie Body Heat, Kathleen Turner told William Hurt, My temperature runs a couple of degrees high, around a hundred. It’s the engine or something. Since childhood, my well-being has run high. In my grade school autobiography, I observed a difference with kids who sobbed the first day of school. I’m not the maudlin type, I wrote, brandishing a word I’d recently learned.

Happy people are boring. Where’s the drama? opines classmate Christopher, sixty plus like me. Readers won’t relate.

I ask an AI bot, Name a fictional character who is intrinsically happy. The answer comes back: “Pollyanna” – whose name now signifies foolish cheerfulness and naivety. Sigh.

I never went around skipping with joy or humming an upbeat tune. My resting face was neutral, not a sunbeam.  But friends and sensitive strangers nevertheless detected my high happiness set point. 

In college, one day I trailed after my tear-streaked best friend pleading What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Victoria wheeled around and crooked an angry finger. The trouble with you is you’ve never suffered, she accused, leaning on “suffered” as if on a triumphant chord of mournfulness. I wandered home, stung. True, I never wallowed in misery as Victoria did periodically. Did that make me irredeemably shallow?

Ten years later, I felt drawn to a Tarot teacher named Crystal. With limpid brown eyes and a confident voice that gathered insights from the corners of the universe, Crystal asked, Can I interview you for my book on living a charmed life? I stared. A charmed life? As if bolts of luck had struck me above? Thanks! I’ll pass.

During my workshop turn, I read a rhapsody on my two-hour walks from home encountering just squirrels, rabbits, and an occasional pickup truck. In a class of twelve, not one classmate murmurs, I envy you. Instead they demand, What made you that way? What are you struggling to escape? Solitude is your coping, got it, but what about your underlying trauma?

I squirm, pained that they mistake serenity for illness.

Not long after I married, I overheard my husband and his oldest friend discussing their ambitions and mine. Imagine, she has a Ph.D., and whatever job gives her spare time for music, writing, and art is fine with her, remarked Bu, the man I loved. She’s too easily satisfied.

I trotted out Bu’s last three words whenever he gazed at me in wonder after a morning hug. Why are you so happy?

Too easily satisfied, I’d respond, tweaking his remark into an affectionate joke. I had my buoyant nature, he had awe for handmade Mercedes cars.

Decades on, I still haven’t descended into the dumps for long. I’ve had conflicts, yes: My mother never warmed to the man I married. Troubles, yes: A client rejected my work and took me to court. Worries, certainly: How to fire that overpriced accountant? But no deep-torture agonies.

When I write, I dramatize a discovery or insight, etch a quandary, or structure a spiral of irony. Some themes: What is it to tell the truth about your past? Do crossed boundaries and transgressions ensnare everyone? How does history live on inside of us? 

And here: Is a happiness set point of, say, 88.6 out of 100 a blessing or a curse?