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Culture

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5 August 2025

5 min read

I disobeyed Disney’s command to 'celebrate happy’

You don’t have to live your best life

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

Disneyland.

I’ve just got back from a wonderful family holiday in California. And, of course, we couldn’t take our teenage daughters to California and not go to Disneyland.

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of Disneyland, the Californian theme park conceived and built by Walt Disney, which opened in 1955. We forget now that this was a revolutionary concept in its time and wonderfully founded on the wholesome notion of creating a place where families could immerse themselves in an imaginative world; where parents and children could play and have fun together. In our screen-obsessed, individualist, loneliness-epidemic age, that continues to be a very good idea.

We spent two days at Disneyland which proved enough time for me to have a chat and selfie with Iron Man; become a Space Ranger firing lasers alongside Buzz Lightyear; go on a turbulent adventure through a dangerous lost temple with Indiana Jones; and even join the Rise of the Resistance to be chased by some mean-looking Storm Troopers. Good times.

However, a point of friction for me, ironically, was the theme for Disneyland's 70th anniversary celebration: "Celebrate Happy". 

I think Disneyland is great. A place designed for families and friends to have fun together absolutely gets my jaunty thumbs up. But I got increasingly annoyed by being told I should be happy all the time. Apart from anything else, the motto was clearly coined by someone who has never experienced the greatest irony of all: Disney Leg.

Disney Leg (grown-up name Cutaneous Vasculitis, also experienced when playing golf) is a form of small blood vessel inflammation resulting swelling, a purplish rash, burning sensation and itching caused by walking or standing for hours at a time in high temperatures. It occurs most commonly in women in their late 40s or early 50s. I was one such woman. And I can tell you for nothing that Disney Leg is no celebrator of happy.

Disney leg may have made me more Eeyore than Tigger, but my Disney experience was also framed by reading Kate Bowler’s wonderful book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved. I love Kate Bowler. I want her to be my best friend, forever. I want to be her when I grow up.

I first met her when I listened in to the Seen & Unseen Live that featured her in conversation with Graham Tomlin. She introduces herself saying, “I’m Kate. I’m a Duke professor, podcaster and author with a single mission: giving you a little more permission to admit that you’re not always ‘living your best life’. After years of being told I was incurable, I was declared cancer-free. But there’s no going back. I am forever changed by what I discovered: life is so beautiful and life is so hard.”

For everyone.” Kate is leading her own Rise of Resistance as she resists the tyranny of the wide and pervasive culture of extreme positivity that could also be summed up as “celebrate happy”.

If my life is a failure because I’m not happy all the time, then how do I find the courage and hope that I need when faced with suffering or challenge?

If Kate had been there, she wouldn’t have insisted that I celebrate happy, she would have found some shade and a bucket of iced water for me to immerse my Disney ankles in. She would have listened to me describe my discomfort with compassion and empathy such that I would then also feel able to tell her about how much I was enjoying myself.

You see, I believe that the way towards “happy” isn’t through denial of suffering. It can’t be. We all know that life can be unbearably hard as well as achingly funny. To deny one is to negate the reality of the other. And to make “happy” our life goal is to exclude so much else that is beautiful in its complexity. If my life is a failure because I’m not happy all the time, then how do I find the courage and hope that I need when faced with suffering or challenge? And suffering and challenge are an everyday part of life that we simply cannot choose to ignore. The unpaid bills, the cancer diagnosis, the broken relationship - these things don’t go away or hurt less when I insist that I’m living my best life.

Some of the best times of my life have occurred at exactly the moment when life has been hardest. Because that’s when I’ve had to acknowledge that I’m not in control of everything; that there is something, Someone, bigger and more powerful and more glorious than anything this world can offer me. If I insist on making happiness my god, I might easily miss out on the God who loved me so much he was prepared to suffer and die for me. My best life is found not in “happiness” but in the truth of God’s sacrificial love for me.

I don’t mean to denigrate Disney at all. I think the Disney DNA of fun and a warm welcome give the rest of us much to learn from. Did you know that the people who walk around Disneyland dressed up as the famous Disney characters are highly trained, including the golden rule: when a child hugs you, you don’t let go until they do. Isn’t that beautiful? (I wonder how that would play out if I insisted on that in my church?) But I do want to take the focus off the demand to “celebrate happy” and be free to celebrate the wider experience of life as well.

What I took from my Disney/Kate Bowler sandwich is that the best of life comes from embracing the highs and lows; being honest about and unafraid of mixed feelings.

Life is, as Ronan Keating once said, a rollercoster, just got to ride it. But also, I would add, life is getting fed up in the queue to get on the ride. Life is also feeling too hot or tired and needing to sit down. Life is also looking at your photos afterwards and realising that Tinkerbell has photobombed you. And I believe that all of that is to be celebrated, along with the happy.

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Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”