I'd never known such an overwhelmingly happy group of people as my Dimensions buddies.
That is, until I met H-Croo a group so enthused by their temporary occupation that they took it upon themselves to change their hair color to reflect their undying excitement to meet us freshmen.
But then I auditioned for a cappella and was introduced to yet another stunningly exuberant array of young adults.
Upon failing to join their cheerful ranks, I joined the smilingly sarcastic group of writers on The Mirror staff, whose sharp commentary on the status quo was by no means reflected in their sunny, if sometimes snarky, personas.
Upon arriving at Dartmouth, I was taken aback by the sheer level of happiness on campus. Everybody sung pong's praises. There was no greater happiness than biting into that first slice of EBAs buffalo chicken pizza when it finally arrived at 3:10 a.m. Fantastic professors left students walking on cloud nine. Playing with DREAM kids made you lose weight AND look younger by association. There were rumors that last night's tails left the basement reeking of euphoria.
Unlike my introduction to boarding school, I saw no signs of homesickness here. When I walked down my freshman hall, I couldn't discern any feeble, heartbreaking whimpered calls to mom and dad that had so characterized my first nights of high school. Everybody seemed well-adjusted doing their own laundry, decorating their dorms like palaces, avoiding the dramatic roommate problems I'd previously encountered, even acing both the huge, anonymous intro courses and the suffocatingly small seminars.
People here successfully ran businesses, created charities and won awards in everything they pursued. They dressed in crazy-colored clothes, studied hard but partied harder, were funny and smart and creative and way better looking than CollegeProwler.com had forewarned. Dartmouth, it seemed, only won.
But little by little, it began to dawn on me that maybe winning wasn't quite what was going on here. Things I had previously known to be irredeemable were designated winning, too. Drinking 'til you booted (or, worse, until you had to go to Dick's House) was glorified, violence went unchecked and "brothers" prided themselves on doing things so horrible to each other they couldn't talk about them. It became clear that Dartmouth was not quite as radiantly happy as I had originally assumed.
But why cover it up? Why pretend it's all okay? Certainly it's not because it's inhuman to be upset, even over the smallest of things. And it's not because someone's telling us to be happy there's nobody standing over our shoulders yelling at us to cheer up, or else.
It's something much simpler. Being unhappy is, by basic definition, a failure to be happy, and we're not the kids who fail. We are the golden children, the chosen ones, and admitting that something's wrong is admitting that something's wrong with you. We're not used to encountering failure, and less used to gracefully dealing with it. After Lord knows how long we've spent inflating these expectations for ourselves, we find it easier to adjust and attempt to control unhappy situations than to simply admit our unhappiness.
In the end, we all end up paying for it. We don't progress; we never really change. Because change requires a collective, vocal dissatisfaction an expressed unhappiness of sorts and if we're constantly elated about everything, then nothing merits the effort or attention that change demands.
When we fail to admit something's wrong, we lose the chance to make it better. And in the end, that's a greater loss than unhappiness.
