About Me

Musings of a hopeful wanderer.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Wherein friends and family members will suggest reconsidering my Paxil dosage

So in a serendipitous twist of fate I was interrupted from writing my blog post yesterday morning (at work! the nerve.) and didn't get around to finishing it last night.  I was writing about happiness, specifically mine, but also about the fallacy of happiness as a constant state, rather than as emotion that just like anger, joy, and anxiety, comes and goes.  I had been pondering this for some time and then yesterday, on a particularly shitty morning, I opened my blog reader to find an article in salon.com about this very topic.  Here is how far I got before I had to go to a meeting that I forgot about:

Lately I've really been considering the idea of happiness.  It's no surprise that I'm unhappy with my job and that, in turn, I'm finding it hard to really enjoy anything else.  I sleep a lot, watch too much TV, have a severely reduced sex drive, and probably a dozen other symptoms the DSM-V would classify as depression.  Which isn't to say, though, that I don't have happy moments.  The way Gus greets me when I get home is unbeatable, and lately, has been the one thing propelling me through my days at work.  I can't help but remember though, the last decade or so of my life has been about waiting.  As soon as I can start a new school, things'll be better; as soon as I graduate high school and move out, things'll be better; as soon as I can be with whatever Boy of the Moment, things'll be better; as soon as I'm done with my thesis, get a job, quit my job, move, whatever.  Those things are said and done and yet.

Today, though, I'm feeling better, refreshed, and while I'm still pondering happiness, I'm also pondering what I want this blog to be about.  As a teenager, I was brooding.  Like, really brooding.  I read The Bell Jar and The Perks of Being a Wallflower and really got it, you know?  I kept a journal and had no tolerance for anyone who wouldn't sit with me for hours discussing what was a really superficial understanding of existentialism (Rachel, I'm looking at you!).  It was good to write because I was finally coming to terms with the depression and anxiety I had been suffering from for years and of all the ways I self-medicated, writing was by far the least destructive.  Everything was dark and introspective and, well, brooding. Part of why I felt my writing was so successful was because it was private; I only shared when I was feeling particularly vulnerable or connected (again, Rachel, I'm looking at you).  So now that I've decided to take my personal writing public (or at least semi-public), I'm trying to figure out the public-private balance.  I also think that this is a real compromise everyone in the Millennial Generation is going to have to sort out.

So, in the meantime I'll leave with this.  I don't want this space to be all about the negative.  I don't want every emotional post to be a negatively charged one.  I do want it to be a space where I share myself with close friends and family and while yes, that means I give the good and bad, I, ultimately, don't want to focus on the negative and diminish all the happiness I do feel a lot of the time.

In related news: 6 more weeks!

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