My Happiness - SHORT ESSAY
Trigger Warning: Depression.
Please note, I wrote this at a different time in my life, when I never intended to post it. I, thankfully, no longer feel this way, and can now look back on this diary entry as a reflection of a crappy era that has ended.
If you find that some of whats written here is resonating with you, or feel that you need help, please reach out to someone. There is a reason I am here today, and it isn't through suffering alone.
Some resources:
♥ The Samaritans offer confidential support for people experiencing feelings of distress or despair.
♥ Phone: 116 123 (free 24-hour helpline) Website: www.samaritans.org.uk
♥ A more exhaustive list of resources can be found here, on the NHS website.
This video has also really helped me in bad times.
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| I took this photo in the aftermath of a celebration - in the come down from adrenaline and fading smiles. |
The impossibility of happiness may be precisely what makes
it so easy to be infatuated by. Restricted by our pursuit of it; we cannot
reach the point of perfection implied in the word, because we create standards
too high for satisfaction to flourish. It is hard to imagine that I am not
becoming the undefeatable antagonist of any possible state of my happiness.
It’s not so much that I waste time wishing or regretting.
More that I imagine an alternative present. It never exists anywhere but in my
head, and it never will. As I grow older I come to realise that all of the good
and bad things that happen to me have happened unexpectedly. Leading me to the
conclusion that imagining is not merely futile, but potentially dangerous. If I
can ensure by dreaming of something that it will not happen, am I eliminating
the scenarios in which I might be happy? I just imagined that someone might
read and understand this. Does that now mean that it cannot happen? Maybe the
fate of this document is to sit in my folder, perpetually limited to the first
two paragraphs that I could never build upon.
Happiness is a strange sappy jarring word; initially putrid
and sweet until the last syllable arrives- ness.
It is uncomfortable. Too close to less, resembling too much a lack of
happy. As if one could ever have an amount of happy.
My very fixation with happiness is a lie. I fixate upon it
perhaps to comfort myself, but I do not yearn for happy, not for myself. I do
not dare or presume I have the right to. Instead what I yearn for myself is
relief. Relief from the silence that has always met the question I ask myself
late at night and early in the morning and on bad days at moments in between.
Why continue to exist? [silence] I think I just want to have an indisputable
unwavering reason not to kill myself. But I don’t think I can say that this is
definitively less selfish or more virtuous than wanting happiness.
And then of course, this all collapses in upon itself, as
happiness appears increasingly to me to be self-indulgent. Being devoid of
happiness does not make you interesting, my judgmental spiteful nature whispers
to me. I have never wished to be interesting, more to be devoid of bad feeling.
And yet that sentence will forever struggle in my mind to not be wanky, to not
be sneered at our torn apart by my own brain.
I hate that I am so judgemental, that I am so embarrassed
and stressed and all these words that I hate. I’m like a carcase, limp with
fear and cynicism. A carcase in a coffin, buried further underground than man
could dig. I cannot even move to claw the inside of my coffin, too tired to
fight a lost cause. Even if I had been buried in a 19th Century
safety coffin, and I could see the bell, I would not ring it. I am too busy
dreaming of walking on the earth and too frightened that if I rung the bell
someone on earth might hear.
Maybe happiness is just a name for a tiny corner of my mind
where cynicism has not yet reached. Maybe I need to learn to live there, and
barricade the door against my neighbours. Regardless, I am my happy antagonist.
I need to unlearn the word and forget my naïve definition of it, in order to
speak it.