the opposite of

I have a feeling this is going to be a disjointed and rambling kind of post, because I'm trying to draw together some thoughts and feelings generated both by stuff I've written recently and stuff I've read. So mea culpa, in advance.

What I've been thinking about are the various opposites of happy. When you say that someone is unhappy, what shade of meaning are you using?

Just a little over two years ago, D went in the hospital for two and a half months. That summer I was definitely not happy. What I was, was scared and sad. I cried a lot when I wasn't numbing myself with baseball, music, or bad TV. I felt, literally, like my heart was breaking, a physical kind of pain. I took no pleasure in anything, other than little sudden bursts of hope and excitement when he seemed to be doing better or having a good day. I certainly didn't take physical pleasure in anything--I had no sex drive and eating was just to get through the day. But as soon as he really turned the corner, as soon as things started improving and stayed improved and he came home, I was filled immediately with joy. Some of you may just remember me announcing his discharge and posting the sentence "I'm a happy girl." And I was.

Then, of course, there have been the times in my life when I've been clinically depressed and thus not happy. As I've said before, depression is a very different feeling for me than sadness. It's an essential blackness and bleakness of spirit, a lack of hope, a feeling that everyone and everything sucks and always will. There's an overlay of anger to it for me, and an irritability that goes far beyond my usual baseline charming crankiness. Now, wiser with experience, and knowing it can be, for me, fixed by pharmacological and other means, I can recognize the very beginnings of it when they crop up: I hate everyone. Strangely though, I can feel pleasure, physical pleasure, when I'm depressed. I may not take joy in it, but food, sex, music, and other sensory delights can be appreciated on some level.

Then there's another not happy: discontent, disgruntlement. I look back at last summer, when I was working six days a week and yet still incredibly insecure about my financial situation, afraid I'd made a mistake accepting the massage job (and, oh yeah, did I ever...say it with me: bastards!) but trying hard to be hopeful and optimistic, with nothing really to complain about but yet...lacking in joy. I remember celebrating L's birthday last year. It was a Saturday afternoon in July. I had worked at the hospital in the morning, but she and I and her boyfriend were at one of the local beaches by midafternoon--sat in the sun, went in the water, talked and snacked and relaxed. Then we drove into the North End for dinner. After dinner, we walked to Mike's (of course!) and bought some pastries, and walked some more, down to one of the wharves, and sat on a bench, eating our desserts, talking and laughing, and just enjoying the beautiful summer night. And the whole time I had a semi-sick feeling in my stomach, because the next day, Sunday, was the beginning of a three day course that I'd been pressured into taking for the massage job, a course that would teach me technique I was not at all interested in learning, a course for which I was paying money I couldn't really afford to pay, a course that was also making me miss two days of income. I was trying hard not to be negative about it. But I just wasn't able to take the joy I should have in spending a gorgeous afternoon and evening with two people dear to me, celebrating a happy occasion. And yet?

I'm not sure I would have articulated that I was not happy. I was discontented, disgruntled. I almost couldn't recognize how not happy I was until the whole situation was over and I realized I'd spent the last 4 or 5 months taking almost no pleasure at all. It was almost more of a poisonous situation than sadness (which is an inevitable consequence of life and a kind of pain that illuminates just how wonderful joy is, when it ends) or depression (which, at least in my case, is just neurotransmitters needing tweaking). Like I said before, I think perhaps one of our reasons to be alive is to take pleasure and to feel moments of joy. Being discontented robs you of that and in a way that you might not even notice. It is, it's poisonous.

I will (and you will, too) always have sadness come and go in my life. I'll probably always have to be on guard for depression slipping in. But I hope to never be not happy in that discontented way again. If I'm alive to feel transient moments of joy and fleeting moments of great pleasure, then, damn, I'm going after them whenever they present themselves.

I do however retain the right to be charmingly cranky.

xoxo