Uncomfortable With Happiness

Uncomfortable With Happiness

John P Derryberry

I remember the first real moments of a string of days of happiness when the depressive fog began to lift for the first time around the age of 18. The constant drum of sadness and the cymbal crash of anger didn’t come as they once did. It was odd not to be navigating my life, looking for reasons to be angry, and expecting sadness level of background noise to be as loud as possible. It was disorientating, confusing, and scary. It was an odd experience realizing that returning to stability would trigger terrifying thoughts and a new constant emotion. Fear ramped up high, not happiness. I was fearful the cruelty of life would take it all away.

It was an odd feeling climbing out of the hole I dug myself, only to realize I was nowhere near the mountain of accomplishment. I was just back on level footing.  I was no longer sad, but I was highly uncomfortable with happiness. From time to time, the moment that occurred during a random basketball practice in my freshman year crosses my mind. Lately, it has crossed my mind due to the increase in loneliness and sadness that is being reported in mental and emotional research. Two things I have intimate and professional knowledge of are as an always-in-recovery depressive and suicidal thinker, and 23 years of social work experience.  The absence of sadness is not happy. I think this is where so many of us go wrong.

As we continue to see people tear each other apart, blame others for their troubles, and constantly argue about the right way to do things in the hopes of achieving peace with life and a happiness of sorts. The problem with this is that there is no way to take your anger out, punish others into being better people. Anger always leads to more anger, hurt always leads to more hurt, and sadness piles into more sadness until someone, or yourself, breaks that cycle. It was a huge scare for me to contemplate what would help me be happy. Such a mental mind game that it was always easier to dip into the dark side (Star Wars reference noted), emotions, and make others feel the way I did. See, they can’t be happy either, so no use in trying.

I mean, just telling people you are happy, they give you a funny look. They will gesture to the seeminglessly never ending horrible new cycle and ask how dare you be happy in a time like this. My response is always, I can be many things, happy and determined to fix things. I can be happy and compassionate toward what others are enduring. I can say I will also be sad again at some point. Like when I had to help some folks cope with the fact that ICE was around. Seeing them scared reminded me how fragile life is and how so much of what we have built can be snatched away in seconds. It was heavy, sobering, and a reminder that we should all do better at experiencing the range of emotions and situations we face in life. So, more common ground can be held instead of fighting over tiny cultural cracks of land.

I often tell my staff that social work is not about helping people back up. It is a beautiful dance of reteaching what it means to be happy. All while knowing we will fall down again, that’s the way life works.  But to be happy, to truly be happy, we have to embrace the unformable we have with it. Really explore what it means to be fulfilled, to feel loved, and feel happy. It must be done without saying if such and such disappeared, it would be better, or if this group of people didn’t exisit life would be better.  Happiness is found at the end of a long, uncomfortable journey, and the reward is knowing it’s fleeting: it will come and go, we will experience other emotions along the way, and it will change as we change. The only thing I can tell you is that it is absolutely worth it, life is better knowing it, but it will never be perfect, because if it were, we would lose the meaning of happiness, and that would be tragic.