How to Be Happy

by David Burton

  This point of difference wasn’t for lack of trying on my parents’ part. There were many times when they thought medication would help me, and they held a continual campaign to get me to go and see a psychologist. But I wasn’t concerned about my mental state; I was more worried about them. With my entire family medicated and stressed out, I feared they would detach from the world and lose their way, and perhaps take me with them.

  With militant zeal, I took on the task of making sure this didn’t happen. I wanted a family that could take a goddam picture. I wanted a family that didn’t start its day with a conveyor belt of pills. I wanted a family that went on holidays and did things. I wanted a family who didn’t celebrate special occasions by going out to Sizzler. Every. Goddam. Time. (Chrissy is a big fan of the spaghetti. It’s one of the only things he’ll eat out. Sizzler spaghetti.)

  It was difficult for Mum and Dad to register this effort of mine as anything other than shame for the way our family operated, and they responded with a complex range of emotions. Part of them wanted me to be afforded the opportunities that many other kids in my position had, so they reacted to things like the Rachel and New Zealand trip with absolute glee, stained with guilt for not being able to provide such an experience themselves.

  My frustration with them often surfaced as irritability. I took on the role of cultural snob in many of my interactions with them, to which they responded in kind. Whenever I talked proudly of my drama degree, elements of which they would happily admit they didn’t understand, they would often dismiss my passion with laughter, warning me not to turn into a high-falutin’ arty farter. This game of making all of us feel bad about ourselves created no winners, but it soon became a habit.

  Already confused and suffering from anxiety around my sexuality, career and general human worth in the world, I now added an unhealthy mental dialogue about my family, which was no assistance whatsoever.

  This tightly wound nest of intense emotions festered over many years. It’s amazing how long negativity can sustain itself. During that difficult time, with schooling, retirement, depression and anxiety all happening concurrently, we all suffered.

  Something had to give.

  In the second year of uni, I made the seemingly ‘normal’ decision to move out of home. It caused enough of a schism in my family to threaten to tear us apart for good.

  On the day after I moved out, my mother was on the phone, angrier than almost any other time I had heard her. Several weeks ago, I had given a copy of a DVD to a uni friend, who was yet to return it. Mum wanted to lend it to one of her friends.

  ‘This is so like you,’ she said. ‘Selfish. Putting your friends before your family. Your friends before mine. As if your friends are more important.’

  We swapped sharp words for many minutes before I finally said: ‘Mum, are you upset about the DVD? Or are you upset that I’ve moved out of home?’

  Silence.

  ‘Well,’ she said eventually, still furious, ‘it’s true, isn’t it? You put your friends before us.’

  There was little I could say in response. Yes, right now I was putting my friends before my family. It felt like the right thing to do. I was a nineteen-year-old student.

  The conversation fizzled, and I told her I’d get the DVD back to her as soon as I could. I hung up the phone. I had no idea how to have a relationship with my family that didn’t involve me living with them. Maybe I was selfish. Maybe I should have stayed at home for longer. It soon became clear that my choice of roommates was not ideal. I moved into a house with Ravi and Rachel, and the household turned out to be about as functional as you’d expect it to be, with each of us confused about who or what we wanted.

  On our first night in our new home, and my first night away from my family, we discovered our landlord had left two cases of pre-mixed vodka in the run-down fridge in the garage. We took to it with gusto. After a lengthy night of drinking, we stumbled to bed. My bedroom was not yet set up, so I climbed into Rachel’s, where I promptly projectile-vomited all over her very expensive mattress and pink-frilled doona. While the translucent poison of the alcohol came bursting from my nose and mouth in great gushing spurts, I had a brief thought: maybe the whole not-living-with-my-family thing won’t work out quite the way I was expecting.

  Our house had an enormous yard, and it became the party rendezvous for the entire university arts faculty. After my initial flirtation with parties, they had lost their novelty. They had gone back to causing me anxiety. I felt out of place. I just wanted to watch television quietly and go to bed.

  Two nights after I moved in, the house was filled with drunk, noisy theatre students. After several hours of pretending to enjoy myself, I slipped away quietly to my room. It was after midnight; I needed to sleep. When I switched on the light, I found two of my classmates, half-naked and making out, on my bed. I switched off the light and left them to it.

  I drove back to my family home. I still had keys. The house was sweetly silent. I curled up on the couch in the living room and fell asleep instantly.

  The next morning, I snuck out before anyone saw me.

  I moved in with Amber a couple of months later.

  The decision to live with Amber turned out to be a stroke of genius. My friendship with Amber was pretty much my first healthy friendship with a female ever. I found in her something I had found nowhere else: laughter, safety and mutual respect. After years of searching, out of nowhere, and without really looking, I had found the positive female friendship that I’d always wanted.

  With Amber, I finally started to come home. The person I found when I walked through our front door, in our small (but tidier than average) uni flat, was supportive and welcoming. Beside her, I would find myself to be a generous and likeable young man. I sat with long limbs at odd angles, laughing with her on the couch and sipping a beer, about to enter the fifth consecutive hour of television, relaxed and smiling. I was quietly astounded. It was a version of myself that I had never known. I was a stranger to myself.

  I was me. But I was happy.

  I hadn’t realised it before, but I had been lonely for most of my life. I had been too wound up in anxiety and negativity to truly connect with anyone. Running away from myself, from friendships, from my family, had left me alone and locked inside my own head for a long time. I thought I had had good friends, but my relationships had been so laden with other circumstances that I had never allowed them to grow into true friendships.

  ‘I have an exam tomorrow,’ Amber sighs.

  ‘You deserve a break,’ I say. ‘I’m putting a Friends DVD in.’

  ‘Good. Right. Where’s the remote?’

  ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘Can you hit “play all”, please, David?’

  ‘But what about your exam?’

  ‘Play. All.’

  Across town, our fellow students were having a party. We were watching Friends and laughing and asleep by ten. It was perfect.

  But my mind wrestled with guilt. Perhaps it was selfish to seek such comfort. It was certainly disrespectful to be openly disdainful of my family. I’m still not sure what a child owes their parents once they grow up, or vice versa. In a period of your life where everything is about choice (your friends, your mode
of study, your living arrangements) it’s difficult to give your family the respect they deserve. There’s a lot of other things going on.

  I didn’t realise I was hurting people in quite a profound way, purely because I didn’t have the courage to turn around and examine my actions properly.

  I had played recklessly with Rachel’s heart.

  I had not given my parents the acknowledgment they were due. They had both made every effort to make me happy. This included attempting to combat my depressive nature with numerous doctors’ visits. I hadn’t let them.

  Truth was, I didn’t stop to reflect or really talk about my family with anyone, least of all myself. My stance was clear. I was growing up, I was no longer in need of my family, and I was desperately independent. This distance I put between us felt good as I dived head-first into my university years. I drank, smoked pot, and lived a carefree uni-student life. I thought I was unstoppable.

  I would come to regret my silence. In the months to come, my inability to face how I was actually feeling would cause me to attempt to end my own life.

  I was nowhere near done growing up.

  15

  Turning Inside Out

  With my single night with James as my one gay sex experience, and still secretly suffering massive confusion over my sexuality, I did the only sensible thing I could. I appointed myself the town’s young leader on gay rights.

  Any time the government talked about its opposition to gay marriage or adoption, I appeared in the paper claiming outrage. I wrote furiously on the issue of inequality, calling out for social justice. I was angry and determined. I spoke with confidence. I was Gay Dave, and I was proud.

  My lack of sexual experience didn’t bother me.

  Seriously. I had kissed a guy. That made me Captain Gay.

  I put my celibacy down to nerves. I was privately sure that one day I would summon the courage to go cruising and pick up a beautiful man. I bored Amber to death with my endless list of longings and crushes. I was still desperate for romantic intimacy, but I did little about it. The thought of approaching an actual person and flirting caused my body to shake with fear. I would find myself saying all the wrong things in front of even the most mildly attractive of men, and then I would relive my dorkiness a thousand times in my head, letting myself almost reach a panic attack before I tried to calm myself.

  I made a lot of external noise to compensate for my inner turmoil. My final project as an undergraduate is a perfect example.

  It started out simply enough. I would interview a bunch of parents and grown children about homosexuality, combining the material into a short play, the draft of which I would deliver to my lecturers, and it would be read aloud to my classmates. This seemed entirely suitable to Donna, although she was a little concerned that I had set myself too much work. I scoffed. I would be fine. Besides, this town needed a play like this. I was Gay Dave, after all, and it was my responsibility to lead the cause.

  I had a brief meeting with a gay-health organisation in Brisbane. They applauded the project’s philosophy and happily donated three hundred dollars as sponsorship.

  Three hundred dollars.

  That was a budget.

  This was a proper project now.

  With that kind of money, I did what any gay-rights leader would do: I trashed the idea of a reading and decided to put on a full production. I would have a cast. They would have costumes. There would be a set.

  But only one show? No. Three shows. And then another two shows in Brisbane. Yes. A touring production.

  I would write, produce and direct the show.

  Too much work?

  Pffft.

  I had never directed or produced anything before. Luckily, I was Gay Dave, and gay people do theatre. It’s one of their superpowers. So I wasn’t worried.

  Make no mistake, the show was awful. But what it lacked in craft, experience, knowledge or narrative cohesion, it made up for in enthusiasm. I was ticking two major boxes. The first was, of course, being Gay Dave, inspirational leader to the under-experienced and confused. When people saw this play, they would say things like:

  ‘Hey, gay people are all right.’ ‘I was gonna bash a faggot, but now I’m not going to.’ ‘Man, I think I’ve been feeling gay, but I’ve been too scared to admit it. I’m going to go out and get a sweet dickin’.’

  All of this because of me.

  The second box I ticked was putting on a play, and I had figured out that that was what I really wanted to do. More than act, I wanted to write plays. So off I went to assemble a cast.

  I asked my friends. Nina jumped in, although not without rolling her eyes at my ‘poetry’.

  ‘“The whole world is inside me, and it’s ending”,’ she read from her script. She looked up to me. ‘Really?’ I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yeah. She’s having an orgasm.’

  ‘So,’ she began, with slight confusion, ‘she’s not enjoying it?’

  ‘No! It’s brilliant! It’s her first truly liberated moment.’

  ‘Right. But it feels like the apocalypse?’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yeah, it sure is, Dave,’ she said with a smirk. ‘It sure is.’

  I was proud of that scene, where all four characters (two male, two female, all gay) described these beautiful sexual experiences. It was rendered as pure romance, and it was completely fake. Because, after all, I had almost no experience of a beautiful sexual experience. Nina persistently challenged me on my bullshit, but my facade was so thick at this point that her subtle protests bounced off with barely a whimper.

  But with Nina’s assistance and one particularly helpful and intense rehearsal with Donna, more than a third of my material was cut and replaced. The show went on. My mum drove the cast to the performances. My parents and extended family happily attended.

  Picture my sweet grandmother at an art gallery that held a dozen people in inner-north Brisbane, as a small cast yells in her face about the woes of being gay and young. She beamed with pride for me the entire time.

  ‘Wonderful!’ she said, hugging me after the show.

  Nina’s lesbian partner in the play was a girl called Dani, a free-spirited teacher-in-training whom I had met through a friend of a friend. She took to the show enthusiastically, and gave a gorgeous performance of my flaccid script.

  We topped off the season with an afterparty, the spirit of which reflected the afterparty where I had first played spin the bottle three years earlier. Gay Dave was happy. He had fulfilled his mission.

  Gay Dave got very drunk and made out with Dani for quite some time in a private corner of the backyard.

  Gay Dave. An experienced, confident campaigner for homosexual rights.

  As if we were living a badly written sitcom, Dani and I began seeing each other in secret. If we didn’t tell other people, we wouldn’t have to admit it to ourselves. Dani wasn’t too keen to broadcast the news that she was fooling around with a gay guy. We both had reasons to keep it quiet.

  Dani was short, wide-eyed, and had long strawberry-blonde hair. She was gorgeous—there was no use denying it. But it was her attitude and spirit that I was attracted to.
Dani was laid-back. About everything. There was very little in life that Dani felt warranted being worried or stressed over. She was drifting through a teaching degree, but she found herself hanging out with theatre people.

  Happiness came easy to Dani. Where I thought, talked, analysed, planned and worried, Dani laughed. Life was easy. Life was a game. The energy of it was irresistible to me. Her level of chaos was just the right salve for my tightly bound soul.

  Besides, the physical affection was fun. And, for the time being, it appeared to come with no strings attached. It also happened slowly. Clothes tended to stay on. It was gentle. It was sneaky.

  Amber was the only one who knew, and she’d just roll her eyes when she came home from uni to find Dani and me on the couch—again. Amber shrugged about the entire relationship, but I could tell she had her doubts.

  ‘Have fun,’ she said. ‘But be careful.’

  I wasn’t sure what I needed to be careful of. All I could feel was the blissful freefall.

  I felt relieved. I felt like a balloon that had been close to bursting, my skin stretched tight and void of colour, now finally exhaled, loose and full of potential once again.

  Dani, somehow, understood. Perhaps not with her head but certainly with her heart. I don’t know what I gave her in those months. I couldn’t tell you why she stayed. But her affection spurred mine on, and the relationship gained momentum. It was growing out of my control. We met more and more often, and I found myself thinking about her constantly.