Posted by galtin on September 28, 2001, at 23:07:35
In reply to When did you decide you were happy?, posted by Heather66 on September 26, 2001, at 18:51:25
> I'm asking anybody who wants to answer. How long did it take before you felt like you were happy again? And/or have you ever really been happy? What helped?
Don't know much about happiness. I never looked to meds for happiness because my depressions were not a lack of something positive. They were the suffocating infestation of terror and dread. They were, to use William Styron's apt characterization, like "a storm in the brain."
When the ADs began to work they quelled this storm. Where I have gone from there has had to do not with depression but with me, such as me is,and I am none too sure about what this "me" is.
I rarely think about being happy. Maybe this owes to a sceptical disposition that does not expect too much from life. I do know that happiness, or contentedness, doesn't come of its own accord. I have to work at it by indirection. That is,not taking dead aim at happiness, but paddling toward some worthy goal (like more tolerance for others than my nature is endowned with), and then finding, as I glance over my shoulder, that a little happiness has hatched when I wasn't looking.
galtin
poster:galtin
thread:79676
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20010927/msgs/79872.html