Pursuit of Happiness

"Americans are saddled with the idea that we can and should be happy. It's as if we've misread the Declaration of Independence and think it guarantees us the right not to pursue happiness but to achieve it (Susanna Kaysen pg 41 in Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression).

I woke up at 4am today. I used the extra time to read, tried to fall back asleep again, but gave up at 6. I've been up since. I slept all day yesterday from being sick, so maybe I just didn't need anymore sleep. I still feel tired, though. I'm not really a morning person, but mornings are beautiful, so I can appreciate them once in a while like today. Walking to the library in the snow, the sun rose and the moon stayed in the blue sky.

I'm wearing the Ganesh (Hindu god responsible for creativity amongst many other things) t-shirt I bought at Venice Beach, hoping it might spark creativity. My fiction writing is almost non-existent, and I'm just not as far along in my chapter as I'd like to be for my ind. study. I can't help but remembering my bosses reassurance that the writing process never goes how we think it should, and that I need to just keep trying and be patient. It will surprise me eventually. It always does.

The quote above is from an essay by the woman who wrote Girl, Interrupted. Her essay is titled, "One Cheer for Melancholy." I like a lot of what she has to say. I think in order to enjoy life and feel content, we must understand it's about the journey, not the destination, and that human limitations will always wreak havoc on us as individuals.

In Kaysen's essay she talks about how the high rates of depression relate with people having more time to ruminate on how unhappy they are. I don't know that I'm doing her argument justice, but without trying to summarize the entire thing, I will say that I didn't agree with all of it. I agree that sadness or grief is not depression and that our culture doesn't like to be confronted with sadness and grief, so they try to make it something medical to "cure" it. The harsh reality is that no one makes it out alive. Life is filled with emotional, physical, and spiritual pain. It's okay to be sad. I would say it's even okay to have a day or even a week or two where one is depressed. All of the most joyful people I know have experienced some sort of depression, so it is clearly a natural part of the human condition. I fear that too many people compare their natural grief and sadness to clinical depression already, and I worry Kaysen's essay might affirm those beliefs. It's hard enough not to feel like the illness is your fault without people making outside assumptions about what your problem is.