I have had pretty depressive moments. That’s nothing new, granted that most people have undergone periods of depression, be it mild or suicidal in their lives. During a drinking event a month ago, I disclosed to a couple of my friends the worst page in my life history. And believe me, it wasn’t under the influence of alcohol. Ok well, maybe just a tad. But I’ve never been so upfront about my year in Madison before. It came as no surprise that after that year, my friends and family have been on a continuous quest to make sure that I was ‘happy’. And I’ve been grateful, to say the least, to know that there are still people out where who care. But what is happiness, exactly? Happiness is the smell of freshly roasted coffee during midnight study sessions. Happiness is when the sun blinds your eyes first thing in the morning. Happiness is when your senses are awakened to the environment around you.
Yet, couldn’t sadness achieve the same ends, albeit through different means? The year at Madison remains a nightmare to this day because it is the one thing that can stimulate my senses while overcoming all others. The feeling of the ice beneath my bare body, the stench of the blood on my lips, the allure of sin, the plethora of food at the junk food aisle in the local supermarket and the hunger that I knew was eating every inch of my body away.
My favorite Romantic poet of all time, William Blake once said ‘without contraries there is no progression’. I can never be completely happy for a single feeling cannot truly complete me. It would be ridiculous to be ‘happy’ reading Plath’s bell jar, nor should one be calm and at peace reading Arnold’s The Monk. To do so would be to disrespect the power of language to agitate, to sadden and to anger. The quest to be happy all the time would be to ignore the many sensations of life itself.
I’ve long given up the search for happiness, whatever that means.
