Happiness
(besides being one of my favorite The 1975 songs)
He tells me something like, "Still, I think you're predisposed to be happy. Or like, you're a naturally happy person." That was the idea. We were walking back from Nearillaga gym, it was late at night, and a long weekend. I did feel happy in that moment. I feel happier at night, when time moves in a way that's removed from the obligatory bustle of the day. Also because I am more brain dead, and it is easier to be happy and content in a sponge-like way when your brain isn't running at 100 mph. I am happy in these pockets of time when I have nothing to do except exist, in the company of someone I trust. He bumps shoulders with me, on purpose maybe? I can't really tell. I feel light, carefree, and so I walk with a little bounce in my step the way I always feel inclined to do in such moments.
In my childhood videos, I bounce around like a ping pong ball, cackling and singing and dancing and windmilling around. A little tornado of energy and joy. You used to have so much energy, my parents tell me. We just want our energetic happy little girl back, my mom said to me, through tears over FaceTime, last quarter. We don't know what happened.
My favorite childhood memory is having energy.
//
I've spent the better part of my adolescence believing that my natural disposition is one of melancholia and pensivity rather than optimism or lightness. I am quite attached to my melancholic parts. I am comfortable in sadness. It feels real, and meaningful, and stable. I have always been able to retreat into myself, into that dark, comforting place where there is no risk of misunderstanding because I am my own audience. Joy is fleeting and inconsistent, comes in bursts and mirages. Happiness is an undercurrent, softer joy that rides beneath the surface of day-to-day life, bolstering me along. Sadness is a too-thin throw blanket in a slightly drafty room.
I want to write hopeful poems. Biking down the slight hill near Meyer Green back to my dorm last spring, this thought broke through the clouds in my mind. It had just rained, the air was crisp, I'd felt like I'd been slowly coming back to life after my Great Depression of Fall 2023. The metaphor I've constructed for my brain is a circuit board. When I first started getting (professional) help for my depression, I thought coming out of depression would feel like emerging. The moment I rode the escalator up from the BART into Berkeley Plaza the first time I visited TN last year, the sounds and colors and smells of Downtown Berkeley rushing to envelop me as I rode steadily up. Instead, it felt more like my brain was a circuit board that kept flickering on and off in different parts, over and over again until some parts hesitantly stayed on. And slowly, all the different parts started flickering back to life. The overall glow is softer now. I am tired of night and all its dead spaces. I want to write hopeful poems.
Last year, I spent hundreds of hours walking circles around the Casper field area. Often in the rain. I love rain, thunderstorms, the like. My darkness and intensity feel safe with their darkness and intensity. I am a black cat, I have been told many times. Moon girl, loon girl. Dark reds, blues, and greens. Once it was pouring, so I brought an umbrella with me. Twirled it around over my head and watched the raindrops spin around.
//
"Does sadness feel more important to you?" MG asked me this past winter break. "Does joy feel less serious and important in comparison?"
//
I'm not generally a happy person, I tell PF. I tell her some version of this once every week or two. We've constructed a color spectrum for my disposition, weather patterns for my moods. My default state leans more towards the dark blues. The cooler end. I can be cold, detached, hard to read. Good liar and poker face. Sometimes, I can be so analytically cutting it terrifies me. I can dissect an idea, person, event, or relationship completely, until it lies in pieces in front of me. Put it back together in any way that suits me. "How is it, working with mice? I was concerned about that, because I know you're doing pain research ..." A asked me this past summer, at the SF MOMA, in the Art of Noise exhibit. "It wasn't bad, honestly. I mean, it was hard, and jarring, seeing and working with animals in pain ... But, I don't know, when it comes down to it, if I have to do it, kill one, or perfuse one, or something, I can do it." If something needs to be done, I'll do it. It scares me how I can turn off parts of myself. Business mode.
//
"I've never heard you giggle like that before." He says this while I cackle at Reductress headlines. I am happiest in my little hole, being the hermit hobbit I am. I do not feel joy around others often, at least not pure joy in being alive and existing as myself. I do love being with people I love, but the joy I feel when I'm alone and completely engaged in existing is something I don't think I've ever felt around another person. It's the same joy I feel when I'm in nature alone, letting my brain run wild and whimsical. Letting my inner child out to play, as New Age psychology jargon would put it. I only show people my happy, goofy, whimsical colors when I feel like they can understand my sad, serious, darker ones.
One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can't be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language. My favorite John Green quote.
Most days, I feel ugly inside, like I have all this darkness just waiting in the shadows. Like quicksand, but quicksand that never pulls me in completely. Just keeps me in the same place, in the in-between. I have been angry nearly every day of my life. Marmee, Little Women. I often feel like I must hold onto my moments of lightness and whimsy, or the angry darkness will consume me completely.
Stormy skies. Stormy days. I try to keep them to myself. I don't want to hurt anyone I love, don't want to make it anyone else's problem. I know how it feels to be caught in someone else's storm.
//
"Patient is remarkably forthright and open with her thoughts and emotions. Patient demonstrates many strengths, most notably resilience and determination."
//
People have compared me to women I love. Optimistic extroverts, and much better people than I am. All these women have struggled with depression and anxiety their whole lives. She just seems like such a happy, sentimental person, JS told me once, in reference to MG. I've seen MG cry and rage, read her poetry. So much sadness, so much pain. She was the first person who suggested antidepressants to me. But she doesn't like being sad. Joy is more meaningful to her. I wish I could be more like that, but right now I am not that person. Still, have started slowly realizing that I don't need to become anyone but myself. These women obviously have traits I admire and love, but they aren't me. I cannot be anyone but myself, really. Maybe Whitman had a gift I don’t have. But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.
Still, I get sick of my sadness. Sick of myself. Get it together, it's not that serious. I'm too hard on myself. People always tell me that. But sadness gets old. Do you honestly think you suffer more than anyone else? Some of my favorite lyrics of any song ever: Come down off the cross, we can use the wood. / You gotta come on up to the house ("Come on Up to the House," Tom Waits). I look at my mother through the FaceTime screen, working tirelessly day in and day out. I am sad, but it is a small matter in comparison. Sadness never paid the bills, swept the floor, got shit done. I can turn my sadness off. Business mode.
Nobody has ever seen me cry properly, not really, not the way I cry when I'm alone and let the storm in completely. Big, ugly, alligator tears. I can't cry out loud. I wonder how many times I've cried alone, screaming soundlessly into my pillow or hand. I sit on my floor and sob. Four walls filled with a rain only you can see. The storm has to go through. There is no other way.
//
Happiness is not less important than sadness. Happiness takes more courage, more energy, more hope. These are not meaningless, easy things. I will not overthink my happiness. Won't regard it less seriously than my sadness. You're a naturally happy person. If only. Maybe one day, this will hold true for me again. I hope so.
When that day comes, I hope I never look back.
