When You're Afraid to Be Happy

I think that when you have been depressed for a long time, you get used to it and it become the new status quo. So even if you try to get out of it and be happy, find things to be happy about, and seek happiness in yourself, it can backfire because it happy doesn't feel normal anymore.

For me, I still find myself worried that even thinking about a good future is a kind of jinx on it actually happening. Some part of me imagines that being miserable will protect me in some bizarre way from getting worse. But what is this "worse"? It can be anything from another tragedy happening, someone else I love being taken from me, to actually having to accept that my life is pretty good again, and that I don't have that many reasons to complain about it now.

I always took being happy for granted before. I worked hard. I sometimes got rejected and criticized. I didn't have life handed to me on a silver platter, but I also thought I had "earned" what I got in some way, and when it seemed like that had all turned bad, I told myself a different narrative.

Instead of being happy and innocent, I thought of myself in that happy time period as being stupid and naive. Lucky, maybe, but not in a good way. Selfish and unable to see all the terrible things around me that were happening to other people because I was so happy, happy, all the time that I just shrugged and figured other people would "get over it" and be happy again, like I was.

So, yes, there's a part of me that thinks that I don't want to be happy like that anymore. And yet there is a difference between oblivious happiness and the happiness that you know is only in the moment, and yet is still precious in that moment. I think it is possible to hold to happiness without being selfish and blind.

The other reluctance to be happy is that it hurts in a strange way to open up to those old feelings that I'd banked down. It's almost like putting salt in a wound, though it should feel good, shouldn't it? It's easier to feel nothing. And if you feel happy for a little while, and get used to it, will you be prepared for the next time--because surely there will be a next time, right?

This idea that you're preparing yourself for some future, unknown disaster is really a lie. That's not really why I push away unhappiness. I just don't want to feel anything. I don't want to change. I don't want to get up and get rid of the habits of depression I've come to know like old friends.

I am not saying everyone who is depressed is like this, but I think there are people who definitely are, who push away happiness on some level because they have become like PTSD survivors, afraid to move on past the pain, always reliving it, and at some point, happier with that than anything else.