I’m what you’d call melancholy. Most days my mood vacillates between fairly good-humored and a bit blue. This is not a new state of mind, resultant from moving three places in 16 months and leaving behind a decent job, high-rise apartment, friends, and a city I love more than any other. I’ve always been blue. Being happy doesn’t really suit me and never has. You could say I’m a tortured soul, prone to poetic outbursts, soulful music, self-righteous loneliness, and solitary drinks at the bar. I have been happy two brief times in my life, once when I was 15 and in love for the first time and again after I met my husband. The first corrupted me and stole my innocence while the second gave me a second chance, and made me a healthier and nicer person. But all in all, happiness seems fleeting and tough to maintain, whereas there is no shortage of sad songs, red wine, whiskey, and stories of literary and artistic giants suffering from their own malaise. For me, if happiness is a choice I’m not choosing it.
Happiness requires an energy I simply do not possess. You have to be nice not just sometimes and to the people you like, but ALL the time and to EVERYONE. It’s exhausting. Your moods become somehow tied to those around you and they seem to feel responsible for them. Gone are the days of simply being grumpy or not feeling like walking about with a dopey grin on your face. Your peers will take this as some sort of personal affront and encourage you to “smile” or ask if you have a “case of the Mondays.” Maybe I don’t want to cheer up. My mood is not something for you to diagnose or fix. Sometimes I just NEED to be melancholy.
Gone too, are the days of bitchiness. I’m a kinder gentler woman than I used to be. Still, there are plenty of days when I wake up feeling more like rain than clear blue skies. This does not mean that I am not capable of going out with the girls and having a great time. I love to laugh; I love to dance; I love to love. My comfort zone, however, is to feel alone and for me there is strength in that. As children, both my brother and I were able to entertain ourselves on days when playmates or weather did not cooperate. Today, I read, write, bake, take drives, workout and find any number of other things to entertain myself. After moving to NYC nine years ago without knowing anyone, I got used to going out alone, but even before then I was able to have dinner or see movies without a friend in tow. When you’re alone, the only person you need to please is yourself. Failing that, at least you get to revel in your strength for being someone who can survive on your own. It’s an odd sort of comfort.
If not being happy is a choice, then it is one that I make at the expense of those around me. I love my friends, my family, and my husband. I want to make them happy on that normal level that most people seem to exist on, but beneath that is a part of me that craves freedom more than anything else -- freedom from the demands of other people’s expectations and happiness. I am married to the most amazing of men. He is kind, generous, easy-going, brilliant, and for some inexplicable reason he is 100% head over in heels in love with me. I want to make him happy more than anything else in life . . . well, more than anything except to be true to myself. No matter how hard I try to be what others need me to be, there is a part of me that rebels. How do you love someone completely without losing yourself? We become wives, mothers, employees, friends, volunteers, etc., but is it possible to do all that and still be true to the essence of us?
I wish I could be one of those people who are just happy and fulfilled with a domestic life, but I see this huge world of varying cultures, experiences, loves, and adventures and I want to be a part of more than just where I now am. I make a lot of mistakes in my life and most of them cause people close to me to suffer. As much as I wish that were not true, I don’t think it is possible to truly forge your own path without a at least a little collateral damage. Someone is always going to be left out or left behind because you can’t be all things to all people. I watched my Mother live a life based on making everyone around her happy and somewhere along the way she forgot to take care of herself. A few months before she died at 57, I sat in a car with her and said that she needed to put herself first. I told her through tears that her selflessness was killing her and if she didn’t do what she needed to for her own health and well-being she would not be around to take care of us anyway.
I will not be a martyr, but neither will I be a person so clearly defined by the immediate things around me that I fail to see the big picture. Just as the world is beautiful, it is filled with ugliness and atrocities that I cannot look beyond. A part of me would love to have a big house with smart, inquisitive children, dinner parties and a normal job, but the bigger part is tormented by the idea of living a life of normalcy. I want to be a wife and Mother, but I’m not even good at being a person yet so how can I be those other things before I learn to be me? Until I can figure that out I walk a fine line between what everyone else wants of me, what I want, and what I need. Maybe one day I will no longer need to take drives for hours to get out of my own head or rather to center it, but until then I’ll take the bad with the good and feel just a little bit superior because I can see both. You come into this world alone and you leave it the same way and the people you interact with in between should enlighten your worldview, not cover it up.
You just keep getting deeper! I always loved being around you... you have a contagious quality. I like to think that somethings can not be changed, they are as they were the day you were born. Some of us cautious followers, some of us loud leaders, and some of us comfortable right in the middle. But I also like to think that when you start to look differently at the things around you then those things begin to change. I sense growth here my friend! Only 345 days left!
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