The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Have A Wretched Day!

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There might be some truth to the theory that present day society expects happiness to be the status quo. I'm not sure how we arrived at this conclusion, given that there is no time in the past in which life was idyllic and bloodless, but somehow we've come to expect that it's our right, rather than a carefully crafted privilege.

As we now live in a time where a lack of happiness instantly delegates you freak, people generally buckle under the weight of this imaginary label and become dependent on drugs, prescription or otherwise, just so they can escape the frustrations of it all. Someone has the blues, they run off to the doctor who is usually all too willing to pull out his prescription pad and jot down the name of whichever pharmaceutical is on the top of the list: SSRI's (Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors); Zoloft, Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil, Luvox and Prozac. I haven't been on any of these, though my doctor did prescribe Effexor (Serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors) back when things were really out of control in my world, and I gave it up after the first two weeks. I didn't feel any marked improvement and if anything, I felt worse, so against my doctor's advice, I stopped. My sister, too, was on Zoloft and tried to kill herself after taking it for a few months, something we are convinced was partially brought on by the medication. We both decided that drugs weren't the way to handle our respective issues. The thing was, and continues to be, that we were conditioned to be unhappy.

Look, most of us know people who have survived a time of war, people who had to eat lard on bread or who have known someone who died of unnatural causes, namely a bullet to the head or shrapnel from a bomb in a poppy field. My grandfather went through it, saw people die, probably killed a few despite his growing disillusionment with why the war was even being fought, and when he came back he got on with his life, relished the freedom. Obviously, there was some serious baggage from that time, things he couldn't shake, but ultimately he was grateful for the world he returned to and he lived every moment as though it were his last. Unfortunately, he died in his early forties from a heart attack but from what I'm told, he didn't leave the world before singing, eating, smiling and hugging throughout his remaining years. My point is that when you've endured a particularly oppressive period in your life, you tend to come out of it with a clearer vision of what is and what isn't. You are able to re-evaluate and appreciate in a way that you probably didn't before. A passionate embrace or a night of laughter with friends probably has the same affect as a course of antidepressants. The trouble is getting a habitually sad person to believe it.

It all comes down to one's perception of worth, I feel. Somehow, some of us have come to see our sadness and inability to suppress it quickly as a flaw in our character, which makes us hate ourselves, and makes us hate the happy people even more. We wrongly deduce that their exuberance is a tool which they employ to belittle and annoy us, rather than just a genuine expression of their calmness and groundedness. I am guilty of this, having wanted to pummel a cheerleader or pseudo-cheerleader in my day. I find sentiment to be phony, something that I get criticized a lot for, and my tool of choice is sarcasm, which I think is funny even though most people don't. M. has made mention of this many times, how I seem uncomfortable with expressing affection or how even something as basic as saying 'thank you' seems to make me ill at ease. I can't explain it, though. I suppose I am always suspicious of sentiment and the generic way it is often expressed. Do they make a pill for that?

Another thing that makes us so unhappy is that we have become a society in which not only emotional superiority is the goal, but also material accumulation. If you don't have that new laptop, the new car, the perfect house or the clothes that some no-talent celebrity designed then you're not as good as everyone else. I also have experienced sadness because of this, especially in the last couple years because whether we like it or not, there is a very palpable freedom in having money. It means options. It means the chains are broken. That is, if we let it. I have to say that the happiest people I know have been people who don't have any money, truthfully. It's like they have decided that there's nothing left to fear, so they are resolved to be happy with living a life that is free from the pressure of competition and personal gain. These people really do smell the flowers. I don't know if I'm made of the same stuff as they are, though. I have to say that I have been going slightly mad without new clothes and the skin cream I like, and I keep waiting for a period of enlightenment in which I can say that I truly don't care about my house and how it appears to others, but it hasn't happened yet. Instead, I have to force down the burgeoning jealousy I feel whenever someone tells me about their new 'this' and 'that', because I not only don't care, but I take their offering of the information as outright aggression. Why rub it in my face? Don't they know I'm suffering here? Don't they care?

The thing is that people who are wrapped up in their own happiness don't always know when others are twisted inside. It's not meanness, though. It's more to do with the fact that they love their lives and wrongly assume that everyone is feeling it. The happier people are almost drunk on the glee, and those of us who don't understand it stand back like the bitter Bettys at the bar, holding our purses, ready to go. It's too much, watching them get on with life with gusto, and we make it about their coldness rather than the fact that they actually feel alive.

I have noticed, though, that I not only like a lot of happy people, but I need them. I need to believe in them and everything they stand for. There is a woman in my computer class who is always so happy, so ready to take on a challenge, and even when I've overheard others make contradictory or challenging comments toward her, she is authentically happy to ignore them and get on with things. Always busy, always full of bubbly talk, and two days ago she made me a copy of an interior designer program she had on her computer so that I could bring it home and lose hour upon hour designing my dream home (Arts and Craft style, if you care to know). It was an act of kindness so unexpected that those of us who she gave the program to all stood back with our mouths open.

'Why?' she laughed in her thick, French accent, 'it will make you happy! Why would I keep it to myself?' Did I mention her name is actually Angel. It had to be, right?

I know that people like me, people fixated on their moroseness and who obsess over ways to banish it, siphon the light out of the happy people. I know it, and have seen it. I have to be careful to keep it to myself when I'm around the happy ones, because I need them to be happy in order to believe it's real. M. is mostly a happy person, and when I see he's tired and had enough, when I can feel his growing fatigue after I've bled him of whatever it is in him that makes him smile, I pull back and force my own light out. It works, too, and I almost forget that I'm one of the sad ones. If only I could let it all go, let the idea I've made of who I am fall away and just be, it would be so much better.

We need Angels in this world. We need smilers and 'you can do it'ers' like M. We need to stop expecting that everything be perfect and stop thinking that being sad is abnormal. Most of us have a reason for it, and we need to address it and move on, take back our lives. We need to make the decision to try, that's all, and to not expect an overnight solution.

Make the decision not to have a wretched day, and from what I'm told, you won't.