| I believe it is time for a confession. There are aspects of me and my life that most people will never know. Some of them are terrible and traumatic, and I know for a fact people have killed themselves over less. However, I won't go into how I turned out to be the way I am, but I will say that yes, I am melancholic. No, I am not crazy or mentally unstable. No, I do not want to see a "professional", nor do I want to drug myself into "happiness." Sure, maybe events in my life have changed me into this. Maybe I'm genetically disposed to feeling or thinking in a more mellow, perhaps more depressing way. But this is the way I am. The few people that I have shown this side to have found it intolerable, and they avoid me or ignore it at best. At worst, they scream at me telling me that I am twisted and that I need to get help. It's worse when they tell me to come to them when I'm feeling down without truly meaning it. But when the melancholic side comes to light and I am rejected for it, I ultimately feel as though my very existence is denied. Over the years, much of the anger and resentment from these rejections has been shelved in the dark recesses of my mind. It becomes tiring trying to flip my personality around in order to provide people with pleasant and constantly uplifiting conversation. I am not always pretending when I appear happy. Yes, many things do excite me, though I may not show it the way one would expect. Yet it requires vast amounts of energy and willpower to to appear neverendingly upbeat and to give the sense of wide-eyed wonder for everything in life. That's the way society works now though, right? There's something wrong with you if you're not dancing with joy at all the infinite possiblilities life has to offer. How do I enter deep, lasting friendships or intimate relationships if I'm not allowed to show my other self? The way you see me in public every day is barely the tip of the iceberg. I am not one to wear myself on my sleeves. So please, if I decide to reveal this darker side to you, if I attempt to help you understand me more fully, do not try and force a change - accept it, and if you can't, tell me and I will make sure to keep the happy mask on while I'm around you. "The answer is simple: fear. Most hide behind the smile because they are afraid of facing the world's complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If they stay safely ensconced behind their painted grins, then they won't have to encounter the insecurities attendant upon dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn't know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though this anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning rather horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most immediately flee from this situation. They try to lose themselves in the laughing masses, hoping the anxiety will never again visit them. They don inauthenticity as a mask, a disguise protecting them from the abyss." - Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness |
