I had an email from an old friend this week, in response to one of mine, in which she said she was sorry to hear I was ‘down’ again. Which confused me, because I certainly hadn’t been particularly ‘down’ (if anything, I thought I’d been quite ‘up’ lately), I don’t really know what I’d said to give her that impression, except that I was moaning a bit about Christmas and about feeling de-motivated – all pretty normal stuff.
That set me wondering about what I would define as ‘normal’. The default setting on my emotional thermostat seems to hover around a kind of mild pissed-offness. This does occasionally slip into something which would be more recognisably ‘depression’, and it doesn’t make me incapable of flashes of humour, enjoyment, sometimes even joy, but my standard reaction to the morning alarm is more ‘Crap, another day’ rather than ‘Oh goody, wonder what today will bring!’
I don’t think this is related to external circumstances, and nor is it a conscious choice, it’s just an ingrained part of who I am, of my personality. And as such, I’m not sure that it’s amenable to change. Past attempts at trying to change it just seem to have led to frustration, irritation and sometimes (yes, the ‘g’ word) guilt. I THINK I’ve escaped from the guilt-trap (well, I haven’t fallen into it lately, though of course that doesn’t mean it will never come back), and I THINK I haven’t been beating myself up so much lately (but, ditto). So maybe some kind of change is possible after all. I guess I’m accepting myself more, and recognising that this is who I am ie, feeling vaguely pissed-off and frustrated most of the time. I’m sure it must be very nice to wake up every day and think ‘Oh goody, etc’, but it just doesn’t seem to be for me.
When Lifetraveller was talking a while ago about the time when she ‘couldn’t stop smiling’, I thought, ‘I can’t remember a time when I felt like that’, which is not strictly true, but I can only ever remember feeling like that when I was in love, and that doesn’t last, and you really can’t spend life serially falling in love (and besides, there’s an awful lot of crap that comes along with that as well). And it’s a very adolescent attitude. Better to not even think about it. But I digress.
Maybe this is why I get so angry with the ‘Happy Crappy’ Pollyanna types who try to cheer me up. Yes, I know they mean well. But it seems as though they are trying to make me deny a fundamental part of who I am, and, ironically, putting pressure on me to feel guilty and bad about myself. This is me, OK? Take me for who I am, or get the hell off my back.
And you’ll never know how much courage it is taking not to apologise for saying that…