I've Never Been (Un) Happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

that he was more afraid of being understood than misunderstood. Because if he was misunderstood, only

his intellectual vanity would be hurt. But if he was understood, he would feel even worse, because that meant that the person who understood him would have had to have suffered enough in order to have understood what he was saying in the first place.

On some days this bed is my home, on other days it is more like my captor.

When you can identify the source of your sadness, you walk into the feeling armed with an understanding of

and familiarity with yourself. Robbed of such cognisance, it’s like you’re locked out of your own mind—cast out and isolated by even yourself. The rest of the time the anguish is insufferably faceless; a fire that started with no spark. Most

My stomach rumbles. I haven’t eaten all day, which is highly unusual in the circumstances, food still being my primary form of escapism and self-destruction. It’s pretty easy to tell when my mental state is hanging by a thread—just follow the trail of food.

I had never experienced pain and sadness of such magnitude before, and I had no reference point for it.

The pressure to be ‘cool’ and unruffled is always infinitely higher in situations where you don’t know people very well, and there’s nothing quite as uncool as someone trying really hard to be cool.

You’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re not even good at your job. And, everyone sees it. They look at you and think you’re an idiotic waste of space.

Shame, on the other hand, is the all-pervasive feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with who you are.

You experience guilt when you do something bad. You experience shame when you believe you are bad.

Essentially, shame causes you psychological pain so that you can see mistakes that you’re making and correct yourself.

Looking back, now I know my preoccupation with the idea came from an irresponsible reportage in which suicide was romanticized.

I saw death for what it was and I was terrified of it.

[The] ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ . . . not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person . . . will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise . . . Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me . . . The variable here is the other terror, the

fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.

In other words, you can buy happiness off the rack—but sadness is tailor-made just for you.

Yet, faced with a lack of clarity to these impossible questions we never really answer them; so we choose to forget instead. We neatly tuck the questions away or

find resolution through faith and get on with our lives because that’s all we can do if we want to live lives that are not bogged down by fears we have no way of assuaging.

neon sign that reads ‘futile’. ‘It is this acute awareness of transience and limitation that constitutes mild depression,’

We don’t even understand where consciousness—the source of every existential idea—comes from.

order to define the parameters of what constitutes an imbalance, you must first understand what balance is. In order to pinpoint what abnormal is, you must first define normal. If there is such a thing as ideal brain chemistry we are yet to define it. If there is such a thing as ideal emotional state we are also yet to define that.

didn’t just not like myself, I hated myself.

Worst of all I was angry because no matter how angry I was about the state of my life and no matter how much I wanted it to be different I just couldn’t make the change happen.

And here I was—with no more ambition than to leave my bedroom.

‘We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one

day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.’

‘Normal and natural emotions are now seen as good or bad and positivity is seen as a new form of moral correctness,’

‘People with cancer are automatically told to just stay positive. Women, to stop being so angry. And the list goes on. It’s a tyranny. It’s a tyranny of positivity. And it’s cruel. Unkind. And ineffective. And we do it to others, and we do it to ourselves.’

We aren’t made up of just the happy, jaunty, fair-weather bits of our personalities. The building blocks that make up who we are, are varied.

the ‘negative body image’ block is gargantuan while the ‘confidence’ block is woefully small. And, different shapes—the ‘anxiety’ block is both a different shape and size every day. All these blocks mash together over time like a complicated, never-ending game of Tetris and the end result is us. The more time goes by, the more blocks pile up.

Suppressing negative feelings, or insecurities, leads to the worst and most damaging human emotion: shame.

Shame unravels human connection.** Shame teaches you to hide or pretend because if you show people who you truly are, they will reject you. Shame causes you to isolate yourself from the world around you, shame teaches you to shut down vulnerability because that’s how you get hurt.

Vulnerability is the bedrock upon which real, strong and lasting emotional connections

are made.

To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is a weakness is to believe feeling is a weakness.’

‘We are caught up in a rigid culture that values relentless positivity over emotional agility, true resilience, and thriving,’

‘And when we push aside difficult emotions in order to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop deep skills to help us deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.’ Depressives

Just like we did with happiness, we also fetishized sadness.

Pain has value, yes, but pain and mental illness are not the same thing and mental illnesses can’t be seen as a means to an end or

a route to greatness. It’s not, and it’s vital we understand that.

‘Take off the mask. You aren’t happy? Fine, you aren’t happy. One day you will be. And then you’ll be sad again. Accept that and stop wasting your energy chasing something that doesn’t exist. You can’t spend your life feeling bad about feeling bad.’

am who I am in the now, and I have to work my life around that. That isn’t giving up; it’s adjusting to the reality of my condition and giving myself a higher chance of living a successful life by not chasing after unrealistic goals.

It showed me that most of the anger and negativity around us stems from fear, and it showed me kindness is the only way forward.

Transience is something we’re all so afraid of, and we live in perpetual fear of a new, different reality.