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I promise I will stop blogging about my mental status *any day now* but, actually, that isn't exactly what this is about anyway.

In a forum I read online which has nothing to do with depression per se but which is frequented by a fair number of people with, shall we say, mental challenges of one kind or another (duh, Andrea, that's the whole interwebs), a woman posted the other day that she has realized that she has never, her whole life, been happy and she's not actually sure how *to* be happy. A lot of interesting responses to that, but actually, it was timely for me in another way.

The other day I was in a friend's car and I was exhausted, depressed, and with a splitting headache. So I said to my friend (because I'm bossy that way), "I'ma close my eyes for awhile and you can just tell me a nice story. Tell me a story about the happiest day of your life." And my friend was flummoxed, claiming to never have thought about the subject before, and having no idea what to say. I tried to be reassuring that there was no grade on this (ha!) and that I wouldn't know if purported happiest day of friend's life was actually in reality the sixth most or eighth most happiest. But no go. My friend claimed that perhaps they were just not a happy person, being unable to come up with any strong happy memories. (I found that interesting because said friend has, for the entire length of our acquaintance, always denied being depressed except in one case in reaction to a specific stimulus. But combined with the "I don't know how to be happy" woman's post, I think I've had a wee epiphany. Being an unhappy person and being depressed are two totally different things. More about which...)

"Sigh. Fine." I said to my friend. "If you're not going to entertain me, you'll just have to listen to me tell a happy story instead." And I proceeded to expound on every detail of the day that D was born. Which included, besides the agonizing pain of, y'know, labor, some scary drama with (ultimately minor) birth complications, a really mean anesthesiologist who yelled at me when she came in to give me an emergency spinal so they could rip poor D out with the forceps, and my husband with his sad and scared face pressed up against the window when they threw him out so mean anesthesiologist could do her thing. My friend said, "And even with all that, that's one of the happiest days of your life?" And I was like, well, yeah, of course, that was the day I "met" my baby, the person I would from that day forward till the end of my life love more than anyone else ever, for the first time. I mean, how could it not be a transcendent moment of joy?

And so it occurs to me that I am not an unhappy person. Despite my mood disorder, and despite my relatively dark (some of us might say "realistic") take on life, I know how to be happy. I know what joy feels like. I can look back to some really tough parts of my life and remember moments of pleasure, happiness, and contentment. A couple of you all blog-lived with me through the summer of D's hospitalization, and maybe remember the post I wrote the night he came home. He was still so very sick and I was still so very worried, but I was ecstatic to have him alive, and home with us. I remember the overwhelming happiness I felt to see him on his own couch, the paper sacks of his belongings in the hall, and knowing I didn't have to bring him back to the ward in an hour or three. In that darkness, there was joy, and I remember acutely how it felt, with my heart all full.

One of the responses to the unhappy lady's post was someone else saying that while they *tried* to be happy, their whole life was a struggle, and *other people could confirm that*, that other people just had things handed to them easier than this person did. And while I'll admit that I myself occasionally fall into the "why do *I* have to be the person who has x, y, and z challenges, when other people skate through life with healthy children and rich husbands and 'a Mercedes Benz and room for a pony'" pattern of thinking, those *are* fleeting thoughts and I know them to be irrational. This woman, on the other hand, was so adamant that she tries and tries and tries to be positive and does "The Secret" [insert editorial eye roll] but it doesn't do her any good and other people still get everything while she gets nothing. And I'm thinking, dwelling on how other people are so much happier than you are and how unfair it is and how all your friends agree, ain't exactly positive thinking, doll, so maybe you should read your mystical New Age mumbo jumbo again or something and try to glean a different insight. But some people, obviously, can't *not* be negative and all the self-help books in the world ain't gonna cure that. (Maybe that is depression, or maybe it's just the inability to be happy. I'm not sure.)

And as a final, real-life tie-in, I occasionally in work get parents who come in with the attitude that I'll *never* be able to test their child or that their child will never be able to cooperate with [whatever]. I had two this very morning! And I always say, "Well, let's just be positive and hope for the best and do what we can do and try what we can try. Let's not jinx it or worry about it too much ahead of time." But it always sort of astounds me that people not only approach the whole business with such pessimism, but also verbalize it, in front of the damn kid no less. (And in both cases today I "won", by which I mean to say, *they* won, because I got what we needed. No thanks to pessimists with bad attitudes.)

And that's all I've got to say about happiness today.

xoxo