If You’re Happy and You Know it, Wonder Why

In college, before I started dating Zach, I dated this other guy. Some of you know him and a few of you remember that relationship. It was one of those short-lived intense codependent college relationships that are all roller coastery. The type where you put up with the lows, because the highs make you feel needed and important in someone’s life. And at the age of 19, I was desperate to figure out who I was and prove myself worthy of… anything.

In the pre-social media era, going to college was a blank slate to decide who you wanted to be. You could change everything about yourself and only those few people from your high school would ever have to know. You didn’t have to deal with everyone commenting on how different you looked, or acted. It’s the closest we’ll ever come to getting to shed our skin as a whole, rather than cell by cell.

And every passage hurts like hell
try to prove ourselves worthy through the stories we tell
and convince each other that’s its just as well (-Beth Amsel)

I like the imagery of a snake shedding its skin more than the metaphor of a caterpillar becoming some sort of beautiful winged creature at the pinnacle of its life. That would imply you create this change and then you’re done, when in reality it just keeps shedding — I will always wonder if this is the “real” me, but there is probably no such concrete thing.

My high school skin had been completely awkward and lacking in all self-confidence. My college skin was going to be really happy and adorably awkward, instead of painfully so. I bought into it, completely. That overwhelming anxiety that I was one tachycardia episode away from death? That’s nothing. Don’t look at it. The OCD? Ignore it. The desperate need to find my place, to fit in, and to be accepted? Use it. Make it so.

So I became the happy one. I unconsciously became a bit of a caricature of the role.

I was a tiny 100-pound fairy. Pipe cleaner and garland halos became sort of my thing. And there was glitter. So. Much. Glitter. Crazy outfits. Looking back, I was a screaming ball of insecurity, masquerading as myself. If I was silly enough, adorable enough, and generally likable enough, maybe I could hide all the ways I felt less than any of that. Sometimes I want to hug this version of myself and tell her to stop trying so fucking hard. Of course, some future version of myself is probably saying the same thing about me in the here and now of 2018.

So back to Other Guy. He was equally as insecure and also hid it through being generally ridiculous. The difference was that he had no trust in happiness as an emotion, even less as a long-term state of being.  He said it frequently, “I just don’t trust feeling happy.”

And we balked. Did he want to feel depressed? It just didn’t compute. The harder he fell into that pit, the more I dug in on my EVERYTHING IS AWESOME routine. You just had to want it enough, I figured. My friends and I disagreed with him frequently and vehemently on this point.

Yet, it was two sides of the same coin. I didn’t have to trust happiness because I was forcing myself into it.

I can’t say there was any solid decision making on my part where I said, “I am going to be happy, damn it.” But I liked how people interacted with me when I was obnoxiously cheerful and very very sparkly. I wanted, desperately, to be this person. And a lot of the times, I succeeded in the fake it ’til you make it approach, mostly unconscious of even faking it to begin with. It isn’t that I was not authentic, it’s that it wasn’t complete. It was like me doing a deep clean on my bedroom closet, sitting inside it, and declaring that the house is totally clean, can’t you tell?! I mean, do you see any mess?

And if I wasn’t feeling happy enough? There was always cheap liquor.

It was easy to hold onto this image of myself, because the external factors weren’t beating me up yet. I just had to ignore all the internal stuff and play along. The one time things did get tough – when I had to have heart surgery – I ran away and switched schools to try to escape the anxiety. Then I came crawling back and picked up where I left off.

Essentially, I had the privilege of making myself happy, at least on the surface. It just wasn’t sustainable. During the winter between Other Guy and Zach I fell into the pit of seasonal affective disorder. The anxiety and OCD broke through more and more. I hadn’t left that baggage in my childhood home, after all. It wasn’t a surface-level skin waiting to be shed. I just painted over it with glitter.

Eventually, the real world happened. The one where I became an adult with adult-sized problems. Where decisions had actual consequences. And now? Now I get it. I get what Other Guy was saying nearly half my lifetime ago. I can recognize it as the hopelessness that comes from depression, from feeling emotionally beaten one too many times.

I think we all have a different capacities at different times to deal with the rocky undercurrent of life and emotions. Add in wonky brain chemistry and it does become difficult to trust happiness. Hell, it’s difficult to trust ok-ness. I wouldn’t even go so far as to say I feel happy right now – there are too many circumstantial things going on for that – but even the absence of acute all-consuming anxiety and depression feels like a hole waiting to be filled by… more anxiety and depression. It feels like an invitation. The other shoe is just waiting for me to look down so it can squish me without my ever expecting it.

So I look up. I try to accept this high-neutral, but I cannot say I trust it entirely. Part of that is the specter of OCD that never entirely goes away, the one that considers the universe to be basically malevolent. Another part has been learned over the last couple of decades, that you can’t force happiness and expect it to stick around indefinitely. And that even despite the very best efforts, things will circle back around eventually.

Of course, when you’re down in the muck of depression you’re never sitting around thinking, “I’m depressed, but I know I will be happy again.” That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Depression and overwhelming anxiety feel permanent.

Happiness? It feels tenuous.

It’s not that I want the darkness to resurface, it’s that I’m bracing for it.

I guess I need to take what I can get for as long as I can get it. But I’m sleeping with one eye open.

When the darkness still won’t turn to dawn
It’s like the underworld, and nothing pulls you up
You were the shining one
Yeah, turning the wheel the other way
Happy to chase those
Glimmers of sun around the day (-Dar Williams)