I’m in one of the weirdest states I can remember being in: I’m happy. And it doesn’t feel like a reprieve from the depression, it feels like a thing that’s going to last. I’ve been writing a bit about that in the last several posts, but the more I think about it and settle into it, the weirder it feels.
I’ve struggled with mental illness since my late teens. I wrote about that in the Mental Health post. The thing is, I had come to just expect that some part of me would always be sad. Like, I was capable of momentary happiness, but my default state would be at least a little depressed. There would be times of joy, but - to be as dramatic as possible about it - life would mostly be about suffering.
On paper, things have looked good for a long time. I’ve been in a relationship with the same wonderful person for almost 19 years, and some people think the key to happiness is being in a relationship. I’ve been consistently employed, and while I’ve changed jobs over the years, I never went unemployed for any serious length of time. Any quick glance at LinkedIn will show you that there are plenty of people who feel that the key to happiness is having a job, and that hasn’t been an issue. Animal lovers will tell you that the key to happiness is having pets, and I’ve had great ones. Some people think the key to happiness is money, and we’re certainly not wealthy, but we have never had really serious money troubles. I could go on, but the bottom line is that there are tons of “keys to happiness” in my life that I’ve had present for a while now.
But I wasn’t happy. There were good things in my life, and I had some things about which I was happy, but there was an ever-present darkness that I couldn’t shake. And yes, there have of course been things to be sad about. That’s life, right? And some people who know my life story might even see the things I’ve been through as legitimate reasons to be permanently sad. There’s a reason I was diagnosed with PTSD.
Right now I’m thinking of all of the times people in my life have called me resilient. Some of the people I love the most have said to me throughout the years that they notice that I never stop working to make things better. But honestly, that went in one ear and out the other. It was never a choice in my mind. I wasn’t going to just stop trying to make things better - it wasn’t in me. But as I write this paragraph, I’m realizing that maybe that trait is, in fact, noteworthy. Maybe those people weren’t just paying lip service. Maybe there is something about me that refused (and maybe keeps on refusing) to give up.
The title of this post is “Precariously Happy” for a reason. My PTSD has drilled into me throughout the decades that happiness isn’t permanent, and that something catastrophic is always going to happen to send me back into the depths of despair. But that’s the weird part. As much as it feels like tempting fate to even write this, this happiness truly feels different.
It doesn’t feel like blissful ignorance. I have no doubt in my mind that awful things will happen in my life in the future. I don’t feel like I’m seeing through rose-colored glasses, because it doesn’t feel like I’ve reached the happy ending at the age of 38. Bad stuff WILL happen. What makes this feel so weird, though, is that those “depths of despair” I mentioned very much feel like a thing of the past. Will I be sad again? Yes, of course. But will it feel like I am shattered beyond repair? I don’t think so.
That “never stop trying” thing I mentioned? It feels like it is finally - FINALLY - paying off.
As secure as my marriage has looked for so long, I never truly felt secure in it. Now I really truly do, I think in large part because of my always trying to make it better and always working on it. (Also, I have an incredible spouse, who has always been just as invested as putting the work in as I have, and who has always worked to understand and accommodate my past and my struggles.)
In social situations - or any situation that involves other people - my hyper-vigilance seems to be gone. I’m not spending every millisecond looking for who’s out to get me or who is going to hurt me next. It’s not that my being aware of dangers around me has disappeared - that would be unsafe - but it has become so much more appropriately tuned into the reality of my world than it used to be. For decades, it has been that every tiny change in another person’s demeanor, tone of voice, facial expression, or body language meant the world was about to end. That may seem like hyperbole, but that’s truly how I felt. That’s not how I feel anymore.
At work (I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about work in a previous post, but I’m breaking that rule for a half a second), I’m not constantly worried that every tiny thing I do or don’t do is going to get me fired. I realize that I’ll make mistakes at my job, I realize that I’ll get constructive feedback at some point, but that feedback doesn’t feel like it’s going to throw me into the abyss like it used to. And even if the worst were to happen and I were to lose my job, I don’t think that would mean that I’m a giant failure, like I always thought I was.
Circling back to mental health, I think that’s where I’ve done the most work. I’ve been given so many diagnoses and treatments over the years, and it would have been normal to say, “okay, this is it, I’m [X diagnosis], I can let myself feel bad.” But I couldn’t, something in me just couldn’t accept that I was going to always feel as badly as I did, so I kept fighting and advocating for the right treatment and the right diagnosis, even though I wasn’t sure that there actually was a way to feel better. It took 20 years of therapy and working with psychiatrists, but I feel like I FINALLY know what’s going on, and I FINALLY am getting the right treatment, and it’s making such a massive difference that it would be hard to understate.
So maybe the happiness isn’t so precarious after all. I think the idea that it is precarious comes from a lingering sense that I can’t trust happiness, and that sense is going to be hard to unlearn. But I’m going to keep trying to unlearn it, and instead of having this happiness feel so precarious, I think I’m going to let myself trust that a happy life - an actually Happy Life - is possible.
I want to end this post with a caveat/disclaimer. I want to acknowledge that you can’t just will your way out of mental illness. It’s not like you can just “try” your way out of depression or “try” your way out of being disabled. There is something about me that wasn’t ever going to be satisfied with a life of sadness, but that isn’t to say that I would have ever gotten here without my incredible support network and a lot of advantageous life circumstances. I don’t want to discount the experience of other people who struggle with mental illness by saying that they’re just not trying hard enough - that’s not true. And I still have mental illness - it was never about being told that I’m perfectly healthy as I am, it was about advocating until I was getting the right diagnosis and the right treatment, and I expect that I’ll be in treatment of some sort for the rest of my life. So if you read this post and thought, “he thinks I’m not trying hard enough”, let me tell you that I don’t believe that at all, and I will always be in your corner as you fight to get the right treatment for yourself. Because, as it turns out, happiness actually is possible.