It seems the magic happiness formula is more than just reading your favorite author or dining at your favorite restaurant or meeting friends. Or doing all that at once. And I can’t really tell what it takes to complete the equation because I have never tried a happy pill or gone to a kooky shrink. Somehow, something in me is aware that my life sucks and that while I can use someone to guide me through the light, I can’t really pay someone to fix it for me. Sigmund Freud and John Watson can only do so much. Somehow, something inside me knows very well that if I wanted things to change so I’d feel better, I have to do the fixing myself. I also wish it were that easy.

If your life sucks and you’re on the verge of falling off the cliff, sometimes you wonder if it’s still worth it hanging on when in a snap, all this could just stop. You have the choice to hang on to your life however difficult it is and will be, or you can just jump off the window and win the race against God or fate or whatever to ending your misery. Of course that’s not really winning because you die. It’s not really losing either because what happens after death remains unknown and you’re also not really sure you had a life then and would ever have one.

So my life sucks and I have a reason to be depressed. However, I don’t want to ignore the fact that most of my life I’ve been terribly unhappy. It’s not like I live in a desolate forest and have no-one to speak with but animals, if animals could talk. In fact I am surrounded by people who love me and care for me. Given all the perks necessary for a happy and healthful life, this gloom still finds a way of creeping back into my system, ever ready to strike the defenseless me, however much I strive to be a cheerful, optimistic human being.

I wish I could say that this wasn’t always the case, that before all these words that justify the drama that I think my life is, I was a happy person and that if it weren’t for whatever it was that pulled the trigger and opened the gates to misery, I would be fine. I actually convinced myself I was a happier person when I was younger. Unfortunately the truth is that I’ve been battling this bad case of the blues longer than I’d like to admit. Life has always been bleak and, perhaps out of desperation, I managed to make myself believe that life really was better then. It wasn’t. It has always been bad, only that now I am almost immobile and hopelessly seeking comfort in a bed that always fails me.

It doesn’t matter how much sleep I get, it’s always the same mood when I awake, tired, bored, demotivated, sad. And I stopped eating. At least I stopped the three-meal-a-day usual eating plan. I binged until I reeked of glucose and couldn’t bring my body into moving that I had to sleep after every meal because all that rice went up into my head. But no matter how satisfied my gut was after making a pig out of myself, something still felt missing. I was dealing with a void so difficult to seal.

And most importantly, I wish I could say there already was a happy ending to the pathetic story of the guy who wasted away by sleeping and eating… I wish I could say I’ve found the remedy, that now I am recovering. But I’m still glued to the bed, held back by fear that maybe life has passed me by.

Or maybe not. If it has I would already be dead. There has to be a good reason I’m still alive, barely, but alive anyway. There just has to be a reason for that. To anyone who’s ever been there and still out there outliving life, continue outliving the unbearable battles of everyday life. To anyone whose life, like mine, is on a standstill, take your time to work things out. There is a good reason you’re still hanging on. If it were hopeless you would have jumped out the window, but because you know you have the capacity to rise above the crisis, you’re still here hoping that somehow, someday things will change. And maybe, a visit to the kooky shrink and some happy pill is not a bad idea after all. Whatever you think will help you up and running again, do it, if only to look at life with a renewed sense of purpose… if only for the people you care about the most, for the people who want to be among the first to know that you’ve made your way out of the darkness and you’re ready to live again.

 

July 30th, 2010 by Edmundo Lee