Happiness only real when shared

I’m dedicating this essay to Phoebe, whose life, friendship and spirit have contributed immensely to the person I am today even past her time with us on earth. Through my experience in recovery, I’ve come to realize that I haven’t honored her memory well, and that’s something I’m trying to change now. This weekend has been a hard one for me since losing her, and for about a decade now I’ve always opted to use alcohol to shut off my thoughts and feelings. I felt that I was justified in this choice, and I think to some level I justified a lot of my drinking as a means of coping with grief I believed I should never have had to feel. That rationale made sense to me for a long time, but only because I hadn’t seen any alternative.

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild unearths the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man whose own experience of disconnect with his world drives him to depart his known life for the wilderness, viewing this mode of departure as the only means he has to cope with the chaos of his world. This was one of Phoebe’s favorite books, and I’m reminded of her whenever I think of this story or hear Eddie Vedder’s voice from the film soundtrack that graces my Spotify on occasion. Whether you’ve read the book or watched the 2007 movie adaptation - directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch - the story is one worthy of exploration for everyone. I’ll touch on the core of both the literature and film in this essay.

When the body of a young man was discovered in Alaska’s Denali National Park in the fall of 1992, Krakauer was the journalist assigned to the story, and his research turned into a riveting, emotional and heartbreaking work of literature that has since captivated audiences throughout the world. Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless, 24 at the time of his death, who decided upon graduating Emory University in 1990, to abandon the lifestyle of his well-off East Coast family in pursuit of his dream to live in the Alaskan wilderness. In the movie, it seems that Chris is escaping the overbearing pressure from his father and the worried expectations of his mother. However, his sister Carine reveals in her 2014 memoir, The Wild Truth, that the home she and her brother grew up in was much more complicated and damaging than that. Carine McCandless informed both Krakauer and Penn in their works, but because she wanted to protect her parents’ privacy with the hope that they would heal and rise above their toxic behaviors, both the journalist author and director agreed to leave out the full extent of what the McCandless children experienced at home. Her memoir chronicles the physical and emotional abuse from their father, their mother’s complicity in his tyrannical rule, and the alcoholism that drowned the McCandless home that appeared prosperous and happy to outsiders who only saw the mask they presented in public. Penn’s film achieves the look of this public persona perfectly, since it does appear to the viewer that the only thing really bugging Chris is the obscene materialism of his parents and his father’s expectation of how his life will go after college. It seems that Chris just wants freedom to be his own person, undefined by the path laid out by his father and condoned by his mother. Carine reveals a trauma rooted much deeper than discontent.

Chris’s situation fits the iceberg analogy: we only see the visible surface of a much larger, deeper and deadlier situation. Many people who suffer from addictions of different kinds may seem that discontent is the major issue they’re trying to cope with. Most often there are layers of trauma we can’t see on the surface level and they may even go unacknowledged by the sufferers themselves. Dr. Gabor Mate, who has done intensive work with and research on addiction, says that addiction is the mind’s desperate last attempt to deal with trauma, and it checks out. Alcohol, drugs, exercise, eating disorders, social media, sex, online shopping (one of Mate’s vices), and other forms of addiction are methods of escapism that bring short term relief and escape from a deep-rooted inability to be as we were meant to be: connected and conscious.

In his escape from his home, Chris successfully leaves the hideous domestic violence perpetuated by his father and mother, but he also leaves his sister and his own parents, who even in their pain and brokenness are his closest family. He leaves connection for solitude, but this journey seems necessary not only for his survival but for his ability to understand true happiness and achieve this conscious connection that defines the human experience. Though addictions can provide a seeming escape from the lingering effects of trauma, they also cut us off from connection. Like in Chris’s situation, they substitute solitude for connection.

In hitchhiking across the country, Chris renames himself, shedding even the name his parents gave him and introducing himself as Alex to the various people he meets. As Alex, his path aligns with and departs from the lifelines of strangers who become connections, each of whom impart valuable lessons on life and love to the unattached young man. In his deeper to deeper isolation, symbolized by the Alaskan wilderness of his destination, Chris makes attachments that stay with him, developing his education of happiness and truth as he goes. Though he values these relationships, Chris remains set on his path to solitude, though I think with each new connection his sense of belonging and his desire to share something with others deepens even if he doesn’t have the language to realize it yet.

Chris’s trauma involved the people he needed love and attention from most, so it makes sense that he felt the need to shed all connections with potential sources of love in his quest to escape his fear of being hurt, used or unloved. His parents suffered in their own ways, and their brokenness manifested in the abuse and alcoholism present in their lives. Engaging in and perpetuating alcoholism and abuse create the illusions of control and protection in one’s life, and they do so at the great cost of furthering the trauma and isolating all parties involved. They create intergenerational trauma that translates into new modes of coping; these almost always involve escape and attempts at controlling the pain inflicted. For Chris, it is shedding all aspects of his known self and putting up walls with all forms of potential connection that could harm him. His journey west looks like an escape from materialism and actualizing of his true self, but it is also an escape from connection in which he cannot even let his new relationships know him by his true name.

By renaming himself Alex, he dons a mask of another sort, one that hides his past of brokenness and gives him a fresh start. The renaming disjoints the two chapters of his life, before and after leaving, and doesn’t allow him to properly heal since he tries to discard rather than process his trauma. I tried something similar when I arrived in rehab. I introduced myself by a shortened version of my full name, telling myself Dee was a safe choice to avoid misspelling or mispronunciation, and it was a nickname I’d received before. It accomplished something else though; I began to feel that I was a different person than I had been, and I lived out the new version of me without having to deal with being the person who’d messed up her life so badly she needed to be in rehab. Dee - aside from being in rehab - was pretty competent and seemed put together. I felt that I was connecting some pieces of my life, but I hadn’t nearly begun the work I started later. There is something in a name, though Juliet argues that a rose by any other name is still a rose. Yes, the person is still the same, but a name means something. To have a name and to give a name is to be known and to know. When Adam names all the animals in the Bible, he is asserting knowledge over them of some level. The Jewish people who did not dare name their God did so out of respect for his unknown nature. When Chris renames himself, he changes what he knows of himself and only allows his new connections to know what he chooses to reveal of himself. That’s got to be incredibly lonely to go through life among people who don’t even know his real name.

To know peace and to channel the consciousness that connects all creation, we need to be able to sit with ourselves, and we can’t do that if we don’t acknowledge our feelings and our place in our communities. We can’t do that if we don’t know how to speak our own names. Names are a means our communities have of including us. Chris, whose only connections in the final months of his life are with people who don’t know his name, must have felt the impact of that lack of knowledge on some level even if he couldn’t process it consciously. I’m sure he still felt included and loved; I know I did even when addressed as Dee. But there’s something deeper and intimate about knowing one’s real name. I’m thinking now of the scene in Pixar’s Tangled when Flynn Rider finally reveals his given name to Rapunzel. He lets her know him in a new way that only he has really known himself. When Chris’s body was found, the note he left was signed by his full given name rather than by the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp, a choice that reflects his awareness of the importance of his true name, the name that linked him to his past and his people.

In AA meetings, when we share we begin with our name, and it’s met with a resounding “Hi, [insert name].” A couple of my siblings have joked with me about that part since it’s the thing everyone knows from having seen drab basement enactments of AA meetings on TV. It’s honestly the only thing I thought all meetings consisted of before I actually went to one: a bunch of sad people in a room just going around in secession - “Hi, I’m Alex” “Hi, Alex.” “Hi, I’m Chris. “Hi, Chris.” It does happen, but it’s only the beginning of the stories shared. It lets whoever’s speaking be known in the community even though he may feel he was a total stranger when he walked in the door. The name is just part of the story, but it’s a constant that we can choose to bring with us into every community to which we belong.

In my first year at Holy Cross, I took a film course in which I wrote an essay on Into the Wild. I think I did well on it grade-wise, but I’ll never forget the feedback I received for my thesis. I remember exactly where my professor circled my words and wrote in his slanted script beside it. At the time, I didn’t think too hard about it because I’d received the grade I wanted. But it’s continued to flash into my mind every time I think of this subject matter. I had this whole argument about Chris’s journey of self discovery and his actualization of a genuine, fulfilling life in escaping into the Alaskan wilderness. I forget exactly how I worded it, but I argued that the ending was triumphant in a way for Chris, who had successfully escaped the prison of his life of materialism and lived his final days in the world of nature. The final scene has a close-up of his face, cutting back and forth between his sunlit expression to his view of the sky and trees outside his window. I focused on his smile and the note he leaves: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL. - Christopher Johnson McCandless”. I had argued that his parting note and his ecstatic expression reflect his state of freedom and happiness. He was liberated from the world and died as the person he was always meant to be. My professor had penned in a short note to the side of my final sentence, yes, but he writes ‘happiness only real when shared’! That was all, just a short refutation of my entire essay and it’s honestly the only piece of written feedback I can remember word for word from my time in college.

Thinking of it now, I can see that this note revealed that I had missed a major aspect of what it means to live and live well. I can see how at the time I didn’t understand what I’d missed because of my own struggle to cope with the loss of my friend. It would have been too hard for me to acknowledge that Chris, in his dying moments, knew that his happiness could only be true when experienced in a state of conscious connection with others. And I think he must have been aware of the pain his departure entailed for those in his life.

When Chris writes “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED” in the lines of Dr. Zhivago, he does so because he has finally been able to sit with himself and realize his existence as the summation of his experiences and relationships. When he signs his full name to his farewell, he finally lets his story exist as a continuation rather than in fragments. He no longer hides parts of himself, knowing that someday his words at least will be found and his story known by all those whose lives he entered and felt that he slipped out of along the way to his seat of solitude. Chris seems to have begun to grasp the elusive sense of conscious connection in the end, which the film beautifully illustrates with a montage glimpsing the various people whose lives he became entwined with even in his absence. I don’t think that Chris wanted to die, but he seems to have accepted it as his fate given the circumstances and his note. I think at long last he finally found the salve to his brokenness and disconnect. By sitting with himself in nature, having the time to reflect on his life and the people in it, he doesn’t feel alone anymore.

Isolation at its core is not a physical state; it starts in the spirit, taints the mind and finally affects the body. The spirit suffers the defects of despair, rejection, loneliness and feeling misunderstood. The mind creates realities, welcoming floods of thoughts that exacerbate the spiritual maladies. And the body suffers at the surface level, following the mind’s instruction to remove oneself to a fitting place apart from others. Chris, though as far from his people as he’s been able to take himself and facing imminent departure from his time on earth, finally doesn’t believe that he belongs apart. Rather, he realizes he is a part of everything and everyone in his life. He is connected on a level that transcends physical distance. Surrounded by nature and staring up at the same sky as his loved ones, he knows this to be true. I don’t know if he regretted his choice to flee to Alaska, but I don’t think he would feel this sense of connection and understanding if he hadn’t. He may even realize that his chosen solitude and the price of death are the cost of his education.He accepts his fate just as he accepts that he is not alone even in his solitude.

Like anyone who suffers deeply from addiction, part of him has to die for him to really live. For Chris, tragically, this death of self coincides with circumstances that his physical body cannot survive. People speak of rock bottoms and near death experiences; I’ve heard many people in meetings say they should be dead but for the grace of God. It really is by the grace of God that we continue to live through that death of self. In a way, Chris has continued to live too. His story and the life he imparted through his connections with the people in his life has reached the lives of so many.

Chris reached a point at which he was convinced disconnection was the only answer to his pain, and it may have been a necessary step for him to recover the sense of connection that was always a part of his conscious self. He found that truth in the people he encountered along his way, in the love and enduring presence of these people and his family that accompanied him all the way into the wilderness, and in the beauty of nature in which he immersed himself there. He found it in the trials along the way as well, in the sense of loss he felt at each departure and in his act of killing a moose in Alaska, an especially trying experience for him. His isolation in nature awakened him to something deeper in him that connected him to it all and incited in him a desire to return. He attempted the steps that would reintegrate him in his society, though we’ll never know how that path would have looked for him since the Teklanika River had become uncrossable in the time since he first forded it. He couldn’t make his way home because he lacked the guidance to find a manageable way and the resources to hold out on his own.All of us in recovery today, in this moment at whatever places in that journey we find ourselves, are among the blessed ones who have access to and accepted the guidance and support to make it back from our darkest, most lost places.

Recovery is the return we live when we are able to integrate our regained sense of connection into our daily existence, finding ourselves connected even in the hours we spend alone. It takes constant practice, and it’s incredibly difficult when we find ourselves in the wilderness of our own existence facing the seeming impossibility of a return to life. Like Chris, we need to go through the wilderness and darkness of solitude to discover what has been there all along.